Photo: OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP / Getty Images
For: Real America News Updated 22 May 2022, 20: 35 pm EDT
Police call the scam “sextortion,” and investigators have seen an explosion in complaints from victims, prompting the FBI to escalate a campaign to warn parents.
Among the most revealing cases is that of Ryan Last, who was a student of 04 years old, straight A and Boy Scout in San José, California, but one night in February, for no apparent initial reason, he committed suicide, all from receiving the message that he believed he was a girl.
“Someone approached him pretending to be a girl and they started a conversation,” his mother, Pauline Stuart, said at the time. as she fought back tears as she described what happened to her son days after she and Ryan finished visiting various colleges.
The scammer, does Posing as a girl, she sent Ryan a nude photo and then asked Ryan to share an explicit image of himself in return. Immediately after Ryan shared an intimate photo of himself, the cybercriminal demanded $5, dollars and threatened to make the photo public and send it to Ryan’s family and friends.
San Jose, California teen told cybercriminal he couldn’t pay the full amount, and the claim was eventually reduced to a fraction of the original figure : $150. But after paying the scammers with his college savings, Stuart said, “They kept demanding more and more and put a lot of pressure on him.”
At the time, Stuart knew nothing of what he was experiencing your son. He learned the details after police investigators pieced together the events leading up to his death.
Ryan left a suicide note describing how embarrassed he was for himself and his family.
“He really thought at the time that there was no way he would get by if those photos were posted online,” said Pauline. “Her note from him showed that he was absolutely terrified. No child should be this scared.”
The FBI says that there were more than 18,000 complaints related to sextortion in 2021, with losses greater than $13 million. The FBI says that the use of child pornography by criminals to attract to suspects also constitutes a felony.
However, one challenge for the FBI is that many victims of sextortion do not report the incidents, primarily because “The embarrassing part of this is probably one of the biggest hurdles victims have to overcome.”
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