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Sextortion — frantic teens trapped by blackmailers on social media

Sextortion — frantic teens trapped by blackmailers on social media
Neesa Moodley
By Neesa Moodley
18 Aug 2024
Facebook
4
Global cybercriminals lure unwary children and adults into sending explicit photos of themselves – and then make their lives hell with the threat of exposure and demands for large sums of money.

An increasing number of South African teens are falling victim to sextortion and at least one adult South African victim died by suicide earlier this year.

Sextortion occurs when someone persuades you to upload explicit photos of yourself, and then uses those images to blackmail you.

BeinTouch, an online safety platform for parents, reports that predators lurk on online platforms such as social media and gaming apps that are popular playgrounds for teenagers.

“Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and Discord are prime hunting grounds for predators and criminals looking for an easy target,” the site says. 

Social media law expert Emma Sadleir says she fields up to five calls a day from frantic parents, from as far away as rural Zimbabwe. Boys between the ages of 13 and 20 are the primary targets, and Sadleir says international crime syndicates are behind the sextortion.

“We’ve traced syndicates from as far afield as Nigeria, the Philippines and Indonesia,” she says. The modus operandi has evolved from old-school catfishing, in which fraudsters deceive you on social media by setting up a fake profile using the photos of one of your contacts.

“These kids think they are online talking to someone they know, when actually they have no idea who is on the other side,” Sad­leir warns. She says private schools in particular are targeted because the children have the money to pay the blackmailers. The scammers are now demanding international money transfers, often using Bitcoin. 

The amounts being demanded from South African teens have gone up to R10,000.

An anonymous parent on a popular Facebook group for parents of teens, tweens and young adults, The Village, said she was horrified to learn that her 15-year-old son had sent a nude photo to “a girl he met on Insta”, who turned out to be an adult male looking for extortion money.

“My son called me immediately after receiving the messages demanding money. And my husband shared words with the scamster on the line,” she said.

Explicit videos


In a disturbing development, Sadleir says, the blackmailers use the threat of releasing incriminating photos to con­vince vulnerable teens to create even more explicit videos.

“They threaten to release the photos or footage they have to parents or friends and will even reach out to them on social media to prove to the youngsters that they can do so. The victims are then told to create videos, for example of themselves masturbating in a particular way, or performing sexual acts with items such as a hairbrush. They are given very specific instructions,” she says.

Anna Collard, senior vice-president and content strategist at KnowBe4 Africa, says the criminal syndicates are targeting all ages and genders, but a large proportion of cases have involved boys aged 14 to 18.

“One prime example is the ‘Yahoo Boys’, a group of west African cybercriminals responsible for the dramatic increase of sextortion targeting minors,” she says.

Adult extortion


The sextortion racket is not confined to teenagers. A South African widow told Daily Maverick how she discovered that her husband, in his sixties, had been a victim after he died by suicide earlier this year.

Caroline (not her real name) agreed to speak to Daily Maverick to raise awareness of the horror of sextortion.

“My husband was highly qualified and well respected in his industry. He made a mistake – and paid for it with his life,” she said.

Harry (also not his real name) left a note explaining that he had been the victim of blackmail since October 2023. Caroline said she had noticed that he had lost his appetite and was not sleeping well, but only connected the dots after she read his suicide note telling her his death was not her fault in any way.

By the time he died, Harry had paid the blackmailers more than R850,000, including money he cashed out from the couple’s retirement policies. The blackmailers had threatened to release photos to all his Linked­In contacts as well as his employers and his family.

“He had been borrowing money from his sister, which she didn’t tell me about until after he died. She was suspicious and asked him if he was being blackmailed, but he said no, it was just a cash flow problem.”

Then the phone calls started. First there were numerous calls to Harry’s company, where his employers took messages but did not reveal that he had died.

“I got suspicious when the person gave me a very Afrikaans name, which didn’t match the voice or the accent. They then started demanding to speak to his wife,” the employer told Daily Maverick.

Caroline had kept Harry’s cellphone number active. “There were so many calls – from at least five different numbers. My son took one of the calls and pretended to be his dad.

“They threatened to send the photos to me and to his employers, so my son told them to do it. A few weeks later they did mail us the pictures,” Caroline said. 

When she turned to the police, she ran into a brick wall. She tried to open two separate cases in the hopes that police would investigate and catch the perpetrator.

She tried to lay a complaint of harassment because she felt threatened.

“The case was thrown out because it was not serious enough for them to investigate. Then I thought, well, my retirement money was also taken, so I laid a case of extortion.”

Read more: Time for looking away is over — sexting is our children’s new normal, adults are in denial

This time, the police took the phone and all the evidence that a friend had extracted from the many conversations he had with Harry. The friend did all the forensic work, because the police told Caroline they “had no ink for the printers and also didn’t have the detective know-how”.

Although the police were provided with evidence tracing the email correspondence to an address in Giyani, Limpopo, Caroline was informed in the past week that the second case had also been thrown out because her husband had not laid a complaint. 

Simone van Zyl, a cybercrime investigator at TCG Forensics, says her company receives daily calls and emails related to sextortion. She corroborated Sadleir’s assertion that males (teens and adults) are the most common victims. “Hardly any of the cases are successfully prosecuted. In most cases the victims just approach us to get it to stop or to take down the images.

“They are usually too embarrassed to lay a complaint with police and most are probably too embarrassed to contact forensic investigators, so what we are seeing is probably not even the half of it.”

What parents can do to protect teenage children


Sadleir’s advice to victims’ parents:

  • Deactivate all social media profiles immediately;

  • Take away your child’s phone at once. The child is vulnerable to further extortion and may continue conversing with the criminals;

  • Create a Google alert for the child’s name, so that you are immediately notified if the content is posted online;

  • If the image is published, you can claim it was AI-generated; and

  • Use Take It Down, which will ­monitor the web to see if there is more content. It is a free service dedicated to removing unauthorised images of teens younger than 18. If your child is older than 18, you can use the StopNCII.org service.


Neither of these websites will ever ask you to share or upload your pictures or videos. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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