Sextortion has been a very common online threat in recent years. It is a type of blackmail, where criminals target young boys and girls, posing as young people themselves and communicating with them. At some point, the criminals convince the victims to send them naked photos of themselves and other sexually explicit material. After the blackmailers receive the photos, they start asking the victims for various things (e.g. money, additional photos , etc.) in exchange for not posting the photos online and not sharing them with the children’s parents and friends. Recent incidents show that “sextortion” often targets young boys. The perpetrators usually pose as young girls to lure their victims. Most worryingly, sextortion has led many young men/boys to commit suicide.
The FBI in Los Angeles issued a warning last month aimed at parents of young men who are being targeted by these cybercriminals.
“The FBI is receiving an increasing number of reports of adults posing as young girls and coercing young boys through social media to send sexual images and videos. They then blackmail the boys for money,” the FBI’s warning about the rise in scams .
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Dozens of boys have reported being “victims of blackmail, mostly for money, although others were allegedly blackmailed into sending additional images,” the agency said in a later press release.
One of those victims was 17-year-old Ryan Last, who lived near San Jose, California. According to his mother, Pauline Stuart, Ryan committed suicide in February after a blackmailer demanded more and more money from the teenager to keep him from posting photos of himself online.
"They wouldn't give up and he felt he had no choice but to do it to protect his family," Stuart said of her son. "He loved us so much that he wanted to protect us from the mistake he made."
Local police authorities are also reporting an increase in cases in which extortionists are targeting young men.
“Twenty, thirty years ago, criminals would go to a playground or a park to find young victims,” said Sgt. Christian Camarillo of the San Jose Police Department. “Now, there’s a whole virtual world out there that they can go into and pick their victims that way.”
In Utah, Detective Sgt. John Peirce said he has investigated dozens of sextortion cases targeting young men/boys and beyond.
“In at least six cases, someone committed suicide,” he said. “Across the country, there are hundreds if not thousands of such cases. There are also many that go unreported.”
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One of the cases Peirce had investigated was that of Tevan Tobler, a 16-year-old from Utah who committed suicide in September 2017. His parents recently revealed that their son had been targeted by a blackmailer from Ivory Coast.
It was Peirce who made the connection, examining records on Tobler's cell phone. He discovered that the blackmailer was demanding money from the teenager. The criminal had sent messages to Tobler more than 1,000 times. The messages were arriving on the teenager's phone continuously (every 30 seconds).
“In Tevan’s case we were unable to confirm the original communication,” Peirce said. “In most of the other cases it was Facebook or Instagram.”
Tobler's mother, Tawra Tobler, told the Deseret News that the blackmailer had actually encouraged her son to commit suicide – after taking his last dime.
Sextortion: Why are blackmailers now targeting boys?
In previous years, sextortion victims were mostly young girls, but recently there has been a shift toward boys, said John Shehan of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. In fact, Shehan said he has seen an “explosion” of these cases in the past six months.
“It’s rare to talk or hear about the sexual exploitation of boys,” he said. “But in reality, boys are just as vulnerable and are increasingly being enticed and coerced into creating sexual content.”
Peirce says boys are easier targets “because they are easier to coerce into exchanging intimate photos,” while at the same time being less likely to tell anyone what happened to them because they are embarrassed.
According to Ms. Stuart, this pressure and feeling of shame were what led her son, Ryan Last, to commit suicide when he was a victim of sextortion.
"It happened over an eight-hour period," Stuart said. "There were no signs. He thought he was talking to a young woman and the next moment these criminals were asking him for $5,000."
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His mother said that Last became terrified and raided his college's cash register to pay the blackmailers. He gave them some money and they pressured him to send more. That's when Last decided that suicide was the only solution.
Sextortion: Who is behind the blackmail and suicide of young men?
Peirce said an organized crime group operating overseas is behind the extortion.
“It’s definitely a criminal enterprise involving organizations located in countries that we don’t have extradition agreements with,” Peirce said. “It’s too complex to be an individual scam.”
These countries include Nigeria, India and, particularly, Ivory Coast.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
