'Sextortion' exploded in 2022 when the Yahoo Boys started sharing scripts with one another on how to blackmail American teens.
Warning: This article and podcast contains discussion of suicide
Concerns about how teens interact with social media and its impact on them have been around since the age of MySpace and Bebo.
Each new platform has generated new concerns, and as social media grows and new methods of communication open up, people are finding new ways of exploiting teens - often with tragic consequences.
Bloomberg investigative reporter and former NZ Herald journalist Olivia Carville earlier this year investigated the rise in financial sexual extortion - or sextortion - scams targeting teenagers, with the FBI calling it “the fastest growing crime targeting children in the US right now”.
Speaking to Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey on their NZ Herald podcast, The Little Things, Carville said that when she started investigating, sextortion had traditionally targeted girls, but these new financial scams are going after young boys.
“These are boys aged between 12 to 17 or 18 and particularly young boys who are quite popular in their high schools, who have a lot of followers online, who are homecoming kings or football players, who have a presence online, who have a reputation and have a big future ahead of them. And they use that reputation to blackmail them.”
The scams see these teenage boys tricked into sending intimate or nude photos to what they think is a teenage girl, before the scammers then reveal themselves and threaten to share the photos with the boy’s friends and family unless they pay up.
One case Carville focused on was that of Jordan Demay, a 17-year-old from Marquette, Michigan. He was preparing to go on a spring break trip to Florida with his family when he was messaged late at night.
Confronted with the threats to pay up or having his photos shared with everyone, Demay ended up taking his own life.
“What happened to Jordan Demay happened within six hours, and I think that’s one of the scariest parts of this crime, is just how fast it can occur,” Carville said.
“He was first contacted at 10pm on a Thursday night, and he took his own life by 3am the next morning. When you read through the message exchange that occurred in the lead-up to his death, it is harrowing.
“The blackmailer was saying things like, ‘I will watch you die a miserable death’. And when Jordan responded and said, ‘I’m going to kill myself now because of you, because of what you’re doing’, the blackmailer replied, ‘good, do that fast, or I’ll make you do it’.”
These scams are not isolated to America. Speaking to The Little Things, Sean Lyons, chief online safety officer from NetSafe, said they are seeing a rise in sextortion scams in New Zealand.
“We’ve seen an increase in reports of sextortion to us, 88 percent increase since 2019. And just to try and put a sort of rounded idea on that, it’s something that used to be five or six reports a week. It is now five or six reports a day.”
Lyons said that they have had reports from individuals as young as 10 through to 65, and across different genders, though teenage and adolescent life is one place where the greatest challenges are experienced.
Carville said that, in the case of Demay, the FBI was able to track the perpetrators of the scam back to Lagos, Nigeria.
She said many scams seem to be orchestrated from the country, with scammers known as “Yahoo Boys”, with 63,000 fake Instagram profiles all linked to the country.
“It was really in 2022 that this crime started exploding because the Yahoo Boys started sharing scripts with one another on how to blackmail American teens, and they’d suggest adding them on Instagram and they’d suggest things to say, to sound convincing like a real teenage girl.
“And they’d share that with one another - ‘hey, this was successful when I told this teenage boy that I was going to destroy his life, he paid me $500′ - and that kind of script was shared across YouTube and across TikTok.
“And that’s what we’re now seeing the social media platforms take action on to try and remove those scripts to try and limit the curb of sextortion.”
While the FBI was successful in tracking down the criminals in Demay’s case, Carville said the ruthlessness and brazenness of sextortion has taken law enforcement officials by surprise.
“I’ve done a lot of reporting on the dark sides of social media, and I’ve talked to a lot of law enforcement officials throughout the course of my career as I’ve reported these stories out, but for this one and this particular issue, multiple interviews resulted in FBI agents and police officers and detectives in tears because there’s just not a lot they can do to help these children in that moment of crisis.”
Lyons said that if people find themselves in this type of scam and it is reported to them, the first step is making sure that the person is in the best place to deal with it.
“The first thing is to try and establish what it is that’s happening at an individual level, because one of the worst parts of this is that psychological impact.
“It is people preying on the isolation of often young people, and it’s trying to make people take action based on that isolation without them expanding the kind of support circle because they feel shame at what they’ve done.”
He said that for parents concerned about what their children are doing online, the key thing is to have conversations with them before things go wrong, and do their best to understand how the platforms operate as a starting point.
Listen to the full episode of The Little Things for more on the rise of sextortion scams, and advice from NetSafe on keeping your children safe online.
The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The series is hosted by broadcaster Francesca Rudkin and health researcher Louise Ayrey. New episodes are available every Saturday.
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