Sheriff ’s office reports two extortions attempts

A man who attempted to solicit sex and a pregnant woman who allowed a man to take intimate photographs of her have been victims of extortion attempts, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.

The unrelated extortion attempts occurred last week, the office said.

A sheriff ’s deputy took a report from a man who said he found a mobile application on his phone to meet women online for sex. The man said he “was promised if he sent money to a female, she would show up at his house for sex,” according to the incident report.

The man said he sent $1,340 to an address in the Dominican Republic, the report says. No woman appeared at his house, according to the report, and an unidentified caller contacted the man and told him he needed to send an additional $4,000 or he would send an assassin to the man’s house.

The deputy wrote that he advised the man “to change his cellphone number and not to be soliciting sex over the internet.”

“If you’re sending money to someone in hopes of hooking up with them, you should probably think twice,” sheriff ’s office spokesman Juan Ríos said, adding law enforcement can’t do much when money is wired to the Dominican Republic.

In the second case, a pregnant woman told a sheriff ’s deputy that she was contacted on Facebook by a stranger asking if she wanted to submit photographs of her belly for a “pregnancy cast.”

She agreed, and a man calling himself Martin contacted her via the video service Skype and took photos, according to the incident report. The man then threatened to leak photos of the woman’s belly, breasts and genital area to her Facebook friends. It wasn’t clear from the report what the man was seeking in return for not releasing the photos.