Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Meta Sues Two Nigerians Who Lured Facebook Users to Phishing Sites

Facebook parent company Meta this week announced it has taken legal action against two Nigerians for their alleged roles in financial scams targeting Facebook and Instagram users.

Facebook parent company Meta this week announced it has taken legal action against two Nigerians for their alleged roles in financial scams targeting Facebook and Instagram users.

Between March 2020 and October 2021, the social media giant says, the two individuals – Arafat Eniola Arowokoko and Arowokoko Afeez Opeyemi – lured Facebook and Instagram users to phishing websites in an attempt to harvest credentials and compromise their financial services accounts.

To make sure they can perform the nefarious activities unhindered, the defendants employed a network of more than 800 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Meta says it has already taken several enforcement actions against the two individuals, by disabling accounts they used on Facebook and Instagram, by blocking the phishing domains on its platforms, and by sending them cease and desist letters.

[READ: Facebook Sues Ukrainian for Scraping, Selling Data of 178 Million Users]

Now, the company and financial services provider Chime Financial – one of the firms that Arowokoko and Opeyemi impersonated as part of their schemes – filed a joint lawsuit against the two, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

The companies allege violations of the social platform’s Terms and Policies and brand infringement, and seek to permanently ban the defendants from Facebook and Instagram, while also claiming millions of dollars in statutory damages.

“Online impersonation is prohibited across Meta technologies, and we’ll continue to take action to protect the people who use our technologies. Cross-industry collaboration is critical to disrupting this abuse and to Meta’s broader efforts to combat online impersonation,” Meta says.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Related: Facebook Trumpets Massive New Supercomputer

Related: France Hits Google, Facebook With Huge Fines Over ‘Cookies’

Related: Facebook, GDPR and Max Schrems – Under the Hood of GDPR Legal Processes

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.