Online ‘sextortion’ scheme targets teens, prompts suicides and FBI alarm

A Bloomberg investigation revealed that Nigerian scammers are using social media to target thousands of US teens, earning millions of dollars and leading to at least 20 suicides over an 18-month period. Scammers use video playbooks on platforms like TikTok and YouTube to blackmail teens and rely on Instagram and Snapchat to connect with victims. The FBI has identified over 12,600 victims, but the numbers are underreported due to the shame and embarrassment felt by scam victims. Nigeria's Yahoo Boys are behind many of the cases..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..By Olivia Carville.A digital crime wave targeting teenage boys is having deadly consequences. Sexual extortion, or what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls sextortion, is when a scammer tricks someone into sending a nude selfie and then blackmails that person by threatening to send the picture to their friends and family. .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.A Bloomberg Businessweek investigation reveals the ways digitally savvy Nigerian scammers are using social media to target thousands of victims in the US, earning them millions of dollars and leading to at least 20 suicides over an 18-month period. Scammers have shared video playbooks on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube showing how to blackmail teens and rely on Instagram and Snapchat to connect with victims and find their friends and family..Here are five takeaways from the reporting, which focuses on several of those cases, including that of 17-year-old Jordan DeMay, a football and basketball star at Marquette Senior High School in Michigan who killed himself in March 2022 after falling prey to an extortion scam. You can read the full story here..A photo of Jordan taken by his girlfriend Kyla Palomaki. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek.The Scammers Are Quick and Ruthless.Sextortion can happen in hours, even minutes. To persuade a victim to send a nude photo, scammers have developed an elaborate catfishing strategy. They hack into the Instagram accounts of teenage girls and then befriend as many teen boys from the same area as possible. This makes the weaponized account appear legitimate because victims can see they have friends in common. The scammers quickly turn the conversation flirtatious and send a nude photo first—one illegally obtained on the dark web or manufactured using generative artificial intelligence. Then they ask for a naked photo in return. Once they get that, the blackmail begins..Sextortion Is One of the Fastest-Growing US Crimes.The scam first came to the attention of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in January 2022. It received 100 reports that month from members of the public. The number more than doubled by March and kept climbing. The surge was so fast that the center organized a meeting with social media companies that June to ask them to start tracking the crime. By the end of 2022, the NCMEC had received more than 10,000 such reports. It now receives an average of 2,500 monthly reports of sextortion from social media platforms..The FBI has identified more than 12,600 victims, but the agency says the numbers are underreported because of the shame and embarrassment felt by scam victims. One sextortion crime ring allegedly received more than $2.5 million in Bitcoin payments from US victims. In another case, a victim sent $10,000 in monthly ransom fee payments to prevent their nude photo from being sent to friends..Nigeria's Yahoo Boys Are Behind Many of the Cases.One of the first links to Nigeria came in the DeMay case. Investigators in Michigan, working with the FBI, obtained the transcript of his Instagram conversation with a scammer posing as a teen girl named Dani Robertts and traced the IP address on that account to Lagos. Authorities there arrested two brothers who were extradited to the US last year to face extortion charges relating to DeMay's death. On April 10 they pleaded guilty to conspiring to sexually exploit minors and face as much as 30 years in prison..Paul Raffile, an analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute who wrote a report about sextortion in January, found evidence that the Yahoo Boys, a loosely affiliated group of scammers, had been sharing scripts and photos, teaching one another how to blackmail teens, primarily in North America. The scripts include wording on how to sound like an American girl, how to turn the conversation flirtatious and how to solicit a naked picture. They also contain advice on how to pressure teens into sending money, like: "I have all I need to ruin your life.".The Scammers Are Often a Step Ahead of the Law.For this type of crime to be uncovered, many things have to go right. Police need to be trained in navigating the law enforcement portals of social media platforms and know how to fast-track preservation requests for suspicious accounts before the evidence is deleted. The victims themselves often delete records of their messages out of shame. Detectives who respond to youth suicides need to be aware of the nature of the crime and that even if the scene doesn't look suspicious, it might be..Social media companies say they're working with law enforcement agencies to solve individual cases and take down how-to videos. But Businessweek found some videos still online several months after Raffile's report was published..There Are Ways to Help.The NCMEC started a program called Take It Down last year alongside social media platforms to help teens get control of their intimate images. The service is anonymous and allows minors who have sent nude images via social media to assign those photos a unique digital footprint in the form of a numerical code and ban them from being shared across platforms. While this won't prevent sextortion, it can give teens hope that their images won't spread any further..Child safety advocates have developed strategies to help teens targeted by sextortion scams. You can find one such guide on the NCMEC's website and another on the FBI's site..Read also:.Facebook intentions to attract pre-teens stretches further than Instagram Kids – With insights from The Wall Street JournalThe big secret to making sense of your teens in an era of change🔒AI scams surge on social media: Concerns mount – Parmy Olsen.© 2024 Bloomberg L.P.

Online ‘sextortion’ scheme targets teens, prompts suicides and FBI alarm

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