Blackmail, suicide and the rise of sextortion, the online scam preying on teenagers
‘You are scared and at your most
vulnerable’
DANIEL Perry’s daily internet activities were little different to those of any other 17-year-old. He had a Facebook profile, a Twitter account and had recently moved on to Skype which allows ‘face to face’ chats via a webcam.
‘Skype me,’ he wrote, as he joined a Facebook group called ‘Teen Skype Names Girls and Boys’, then he added ‘NO CREEPS PLEASE’.
A few hours later, the teenager was dead – an early victim of a despicable scam which is now sweeping Scotland.
In torment, Daniel had jumped from the Forth Road Bridge. His blackmailers had told him he might as well take his life if he did not pay them, for it would not be worth living.
Ronan Hughes, a ‘happy’ teenager from Northern Ireland, met a similar fate earlier this year – dead at 17 after being targeted online by overseas scammers. Like Daniel, his only crime was naivety – ignorance of the predators in his midst.
This week, fears of further senseless tragedies were raised as police warned of a spike in ‘sextortion’ cases in Scotland.
The rash of new cases in Tayside coincides with huge increases in reports of the crime to a UK website dedicated to helping victims. In September alone, the site handled 604 cases. Police Scotland have now issued a code of online conduct which they implore all internet users to observe.
But experts in cybercrime say that there is a surprising lack of awareness among young people of the fastest-growing sting on the internet.
They say even tech-savvy teens, well versed in social media sites and webcam technology, are routinely duped by scammers, most commonly presenting themselves online as sexy, available young women.
Wayne May, who runs www.scamsurvivors.com, says: ‘People are coming to us saying they had absolutely no idea about this. If they knew it was there most of them wouldn’t have fallen for it.’
The scam is brutally simple and carried out on an industrial scale by criminals in the Philippines, Morocco and, increasingly, the Ivory Coast. It largely relies on rampant young hormones getting the better of common sense. Often drink plays a part too. Many fall victim at home after a night out.
But Mr May warns the scammers are widening their net. Almost anyone aged 65 and under using networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tinder or Tagged is a potential mark.
First the victim is invited to chat on a social networking site by someone using a fake profile, usually with a photograph of a pretty young girl. The scammer’s first objectives are to obtain the victim’s Facebook profile – normally through a friend request – and move the conversation onto another platform, Skype, to allow a video chat.
Once the victim can be seen on the scammer’s webcam, the process of persuading them to undress begins. It is often achieved using software which appears to show the young woman taking off her clothes while still chatting online.
In fact the footage is pre-recorded and part of a confidence trick to induce the victim to think both would be participants in the sex game.
If the victim falls for it by removing their clothes or performing a sexual act, the trap quickly snaps shut. The scammer has been recording the victim’s video chat. The playful mood changes in a heartbeat to the cold language of blackmail.
The first step is to play the video back to the victim. The next is to post a few names of Facebook friends who will see the video unless the victim agrees to pay. Sums demanded can vary from $200 (around £130) to as much as $50,000 (almost £33,000).
As the scammers can target as many as 30 or 40 victims a day, only a small proportion need to pay up to make it worthwhile. It is thought that around 10 per cent agree to pay to ensure the footage is never shared. But, of course, the payment guarantees no such thing. It simply encourages the scammer to continue the blackmail by demanding more money and threatening more nightmarish consequences if it is not paid.
In one case, a victim was told stills from the footage would appear on the front page of a French national newspaper.
‘Some of the threats are utterly ridiculous,’ says Mr May. ‘But when you are in that situation, scared and you’ve just seen yourself at your most vulnerable, basically, you are not thinking straight.’
Others do not pay – some because they cannot afford to; most because they correctly conclude it is the wrong way to deal with the scammers. But a few, such as Daniel Perry and Ronan Hughes, have been driven to their deaths by the fear of being publicly shamed.
Apprentice mechanic Daniel had believed he was chatting online to a pretty girl from Illinois. In fact he was dealing with scammers from the Philippines.
Hours before he took his own life in 2013, Daniel asked his blackmailers: ‘What can I do to stop you showing this to my family?’
They told him to pay money into a bank account or he would be ‘better off dead’. Shortly afterwards the teenager replied ‘bye’ and left home to kill himself.
The crime sparked a massive Police Scotland investigation which revealed an electronic online trail to the Philippines where authorities launched their own investigation and made three arrests. Scottish police have travelled to Manila and efforts to extradite three suspects to Scotland continue.
Meanwhile, Ronan Hughes from Clonoe, Country Tyrone, committed suicide in June after being tricked into posting intimate images online by a gang in Nigeria.
They demanded more than £3,000 from him. Unlike Daniel, Ronan told
his parents about the extortion attempt and they went to the police, who began an investigation.
But, three days later, a friend contacted Ronan to say she had received a link containing images but had not opened them. That day, his body was found in a field behind their home.
At his funeral, Father Benedict Fee told mourners: ‘Those faceless people, it’s true, were not down in the back field in Aughamullan last Friday – but they might as well have been there. They committed a heinous crime that has robbed the best of a father and the best of a mother of a fine son.’
How, then, can youngsters protect themselves from the agonies inflicted on Daniel and Ronan?
The obvious way is to follow Police Scotland’s online safety guidelines.
Detective Chief Inspector Bobby Dow says: ‘Blackmail and extortion are common ways for hackers to make money out of their victims, and anyone threatened with online blackmail should never comply with it. The offenders are in most cases in a different country but target victims by adding them as a friend on social media sites.
‘These are people who want to exploit others and intimidate them into parting with their money. If you pay you still have no guarantee that the footage will be destroyed. Once you have put images of yourself out there online, you can never get them back again.’
Police Scotland say that the easy rule of thumb for avoiding webcam blackmailers is never to do anything online that you would not do with someone face to face.
‘Think about what you post,’ they warn. ‘Would you be happy for your family to see it or for other people still to see it in ten or 20 years?’
They also urge internet users to think about why and how you know online contacts. ‘If you are not friends in real life, you shouldn’t be online,’ say the guidelines.
The police go as far as to say people should ‘never arrange to meet someone you have only met on the internet’. The reality, of course, is such meetings take place all the time. A multi-billion-pound online dating industry depends on them for its survival. So too, sexual activity via webcams is a reality in some young people’s interaction online. Sextortion feeds off it.
At Scam Survivors, the help centre for people targeted by scammers, Mr May finds it ridiculously easy to spot the crooks. He started out a decade ago as a ‘scambaiter’ – someone who deliberately enters into a dialogue with scammers to waste their time and resources, largely for their own amusement.
Gradually he was moved to offer more direct help to victims. In 2012, the year the first British cases of sextortion were reported, his website received 100 reports. In 2013, it rose to 1,500; by 2014, it was 4,000.
He says: ‘If it seems too good to be true, if a woman is immediately saying to you, “Let’s get naked” on a webcam, then it’s almost certainly a scam.’
But he adds: ‘We are dealing with people whose hormones are running wild. They see some half-naked female and the blood rushes from the brain and goes elsewhere. It’s the kind of world we live in these days.’
His website exists for those for whom it is already too late – who, in a reckless moment, have exposed themselves to their blackmailers.
Surprisingly, perhaps, given its devastating effects on some, Mr May says: ‘If I were to be a victim of a scam, this would be the one I would want over a lot of others because it’s the easiest one to deal with.’
It is easy, he says, because of the sheer volume of victims the perpetrators are trying to scam. ‘If you don’t pay, and follow the steps, the scammer moves on. Basically they forget about you because they are dealing with 30 or 40 different people a day. It’s a very scattergun kind of scam – do as many people as you can and hope you can get money from one or two.’
A key measure for victims is to deactivate their Facebook account immediately.
‘A lot of people are quite reluctant so it’s a case of calming them down,’ says Mr May. ‘They say, “What if the scammer contacts me? What if the scammer does that and I don’t know about it?” So we try to explain it to them. In the state they’re in they aren’t thinking logically.’
The fact is that if the scammer cannot contact the victim the scam cannot achieve its purpose, which is to extort money. Yes, the scammers have still have explicit material which could embarrass their victims, but they no longer have the means to carry out the blackmail.
Mr May says: ‘If you do this, in our experience, 99.9 per cent of victims have nothing ever happen to them after that.’
To be certain, however, victims should set up a Google alert in their own name to warn them whenever material relating to them appears on the internet.
If webcam material were to appear on sites such as YouTube, it can immediately be flagged as inappropriate and the administrators will normally remove it in less than five minutes.
The effects of the humiliation, sadly, are longer lasting. Even victims who have responded in all the right ways to the scam confess to being haunted by it for months, sometimes much longer.
‘I lived in quite a lot of fear and isolation for a good three or four weeks,’ said one British student victim who now shares his experiences at Scam Survivors. ‘Then I had a period where I was OK with it and then I started thinking about it again.’
He added: ‘I had the same fear in the back of my head. It’s like you’re living under a weight all the time.’
Not until many more months had passed could he rationalise it as a silly mistake. ‘For a long time it ate away at me and I was always checking my computer, always wondering, even after months.
‘When, realistically, the whole thing had blown over, I was still checking and still looking around thinking, “Has he seen it?”, “Have they seen it?”, but no one had seen it. It was just a long process. It can really get inside your head.’
Thousands of miles away, in another continent, the scammers have moved on too – to fresh victims. Not until their despicable con fails to give them a financial return will it stop.
‘It’s the kind of world we live in these days’ ‘They want to exploit and intimidate’