"BM Boys: the Nigerian sextortion network hiding in plain sight on TikTok", 11 May 2025

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Unlike conventional social media influencers hawking travel, brands or recipes, their selling point is crime. The men are all based in Nigeria, and their get-rich-quick scheme is blackmailing other social media users – usually based in the United States and other western countries – by posing as potential female romantic interests and tricking their victims into sending nude photos.

Then the threats of distributing the victim’s images and demands for money begin.

The proclaimed scammers call themselves the “BM Boys”. “BM” means blackmail, and hundreds of young men in west Africa are now engaging in these schemes. The videos flaunting their lifestyles, publicized on TikTok to hundreds and sometimes thousands of followers, draw admiration and ambition from other young men who follow them and plead to be included in their scams.

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Some of the BM Boys’ accounts have garnered several hundred thousand followers. The Guardian has identified 22 TikTok accounts run by self-proclaimed BM Boys and also interviewed a 24-year-old Nigerian man who has been working as a blackmailer for eight years. He claims to have collected nearly $100,000 from his victims during that time.

“For me, it’s an easy thing to do,” says the blackmailer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss illegal activity. “Any day, any time, we are working on our phones because if you don’t work, you’re not going to eat.”

Find victims on Instagram, flex on TikTok

One of the primary demographics the BM Boys and others like them victimize is that of teenage boys in the US and elsewhere. In 2023 alone, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) received 26,718 reports of financial sextortion of minors, surging from 10,731 in 2022. Since 2021, at least 46 teen boys in the US, Canada, UK and Australia have died by suicide after being targeted in sextortion blackmailing scams.

In 2024, Meta announced it had removed 63,000 Instagram accounts it said were associated with Nigeria-based sextortionists. Despite the crackdown, Instagram remains the platform of choice for blackmailers to identify and engage with their targets, the blackmailer and human trafficking experts interviewed said. TikTok, meanwhile, is where BM Boys flaunt their success and recruit newcomers to their profession.

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A TikTok spokesperson said: “We design TikTok to be inhospitable for those intent on causing harm to teens and we do not tolerate any content or behavior promoting sextortion.”

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Can social media companies stop BM Boys?

Experts say the balance between privacy and safety on children’s social media accounts must be different from that of adults, and that platforms should take stronger steps to protect minors.

“You’re dealing with a youth. You’re dealing with someone who will be a little more impulsive. So they’re going to make a decision, and maybe a warning isn’t enough. In that case, maybe you need to intervene in behavior because you’re dealing with a vulnerable population,” said Lloyd Richardson, the director of technology at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

Meta has enacted a number of changes in recent years to protect its youngest users. In a statement, the company says its systems notifies teen users when they are corresponding with someone in another country, regardless of a VPN, and blurs nude images sent from or to an underage account.

A Meta spokesperson said in a statement: “Sextortion is a horrific crime. We work aggressively to fight it by removing networks of scammers, sharing information with other companies so they can take action too, and supporting law enforcement to prosecute these criminals.”

Since September, Instagram has made accounts it identifies as belonging to teens private by default, preventing people they’re not connected to from viewing their followers. However, once a teen accepts a follow request, that person gains access to the follower list. Making follower lists inaccessible even to approved followers would further protect teens from being targeted by sextortionists, as would hiding their profiles in search, said Raffile. He added: “It shouldn’t be as easy as going into the Yellow Pages and pointing, ‘Here’s a teenage boy, here’s a teenage girl.’”

DeMay said social media companies “have the capability of putting a lot of the safeguards that need to happen within the platforms to prevent this, but they’re choosing not to do it”.