Empowered, Not Extorted: Institutional Strategies for Protecting Consumers from Sextortion

We’ve all heard of the Nigerian Prince scam, we have read about the rapid growth of check fraud, but the fastest growing cybercrime in the United States is sextortion. Once used as revenge porn or leverage against a former lover, sextortion is now a financially motivated extortion scam trapping teenagers and young adults, leaving them feeling exposed and as if their lives are over. This terrible crime involves blackmailing, threats, sexual exploitation, and often targets minors.

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Growing Trend and Frightening Statistics

According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), there has been a dramatic increase in the number of reported cases of financial sextortion targeting minors. In fact, WeProtect cites sextortion rose in 2022-2023 at 7,200%; extrapolating back to 2021 its 18,000%. 

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The FBI issued an alert in June warning the public of sextortion schemes. In fact, in the last 24 months, there have been over 39 teenage suicides reported in connection with sextortion. I knew more needed to be done to bring awareness to this growing crime and it became my mission to help shed light on what’s happening and what can be done to prevent it.

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Why the Surge in Sextortion Scams?  The Perpetrators Behind This Scam

Almost all the financial sextortion today that is targeting minors is linking back to West Africa, specifically Nigeria. It’s a disorganized cybercrime collective called the Yahoo Boys. It’s a very distributed network, loosely connected, where they share their scripts, methods and formats online in their own groups. 

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The Yahoo Boys have scam kits that they sell. In 2022, they started circulating sextortion, called their Blackmailing Format, as part of the kits. They are circulating their scripts and how-to guides, literally publishing how to sextort minors openly on YouTube, Facebook groups, Instagram and TikTok. These criminals think they’re never going to get caught. They are so confident they will even share content on their personal pages that show their pictures.

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I started to look at this crime and the suicides popping up around the nation, not as individual cases but as organized crime. My research was the first to put the name to this group. These are the perpetrators overseas that are doing the lion share of the sextortion targeting minors. We also see big clusters happening in the Ivory Coast and the Philippines. However, the Philippines do target adult men more often than minors.

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The Yahoo Boys, whose name originated from their use of a free yahoo.com email address, are the same ones that did the Nigerian Prince email scam 20 years ago where you would get the inheritance but had to pay that advance fee. They’ve evolved. They have used different romance scams, impersonation scams, crypto scams, and celebrity scams. Now the one making them a lot of money very quickly is financial sextortion.

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How Sextortion is Done and the Target Audience

The most common pathway for these perpetrators is an Instagram account. They are flooding friend requests into various high schools and sports teams. Typically, the profile shows a beautiful teen girl or young woman and they try to trap as many friends and followers as they can from Instagram to make it look like they have mutual friends in common with their victims.

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The conversation begins as a normal conversation but quickly turns flirtatious. At that point, the scammers will either stay on Instagram or move to something like Snapchat, where people think if they do send photos that they will disappear. The scammer often sends a nude photo first, creating a component of trust and making it a more believable scam. Then they coerce or convince the targets in returning a similar photo. As soon as that happens, they demand money. They tell the victim they have taken a screenshot of all their friends, followers, and where they go to school and will immediately start spreading the photo unless they send $300. They will ask for the money over Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, or any peer-to-peer transaction sites. We also see quite a bit of gift cards and Crypto exchange.

The group that’s most targeted today from financial sextortion is boys ages 13 to 17, although we have seen cases from age 10 to men in their 60s. They do target females as well, however, 90% to 95% of the financially motivated incidents are targeting men. Young boys and men have been an untapped market. These teens are more financially connected to the world now because they now have financial apps, and they are a ripe new target for scams.

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The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Sextortion

Since the release of ChatGPT, we have seen a proliferation of scams. In the early days of the Nigerian Prince scam, you could tell it was potentially a scam by spotting spelling errors and punctuation mistakes. Now, because of AI, the quality and sophistication of scams has only improved. Not only are these groups using AI, but they’re also using American slang, vernacular and emojis that would make sense in an American context. They understand the kind of cultural components as well. These scam accounts are more convincing than ever before, and the catfish accounts are extremely manipulative.

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The other parts we see with AI is that sometimes these victims will be chatting with the scammer and their “Spidey sense” will go off. So, they ask if the “female” they’re chatting with can do a peace sign or a thumbs up. These criminals put the photos of the model they’re using in an AI system and have them do what the victim has asked to make it look real.

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In other instances, the criminal will try to coerce the victim into sending that nude photo. Even if the victim doesn’t send it, the criminal will use apps like Nudify or Clothes Off and remove the clothes from the victim’s real Instagram photos and then use that to blackmail them.

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Combating Sextortion: Protections to Put in Place

There are different red flags and risk indicators, especially with peer-to-peer transaction services. There should be a way to detect if someone is sending a message saying, “Send more money now or I’ll leak your nudes.” Words that should trigger some detection mechanisms.

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If money is going from teen accounts in the US to high-risk geographies such as Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Philippines, that should flag as suspicious activity. Even if it’s not sextortion, it’s probably some other scam that’s happening. Something suspicious is happening if it’s a teen account, male, in the US, and they liquidate their entire account and try to send to one of those geographies. On LinkedIn, Stacey Troup talks about how banks should look at $100 spent for a kid the same way they look at $10,000 for an adult. If a kid starts to send large amounts to someone they haven’t transacted with before, that’s a red flag.

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Snapchat conducted a survey of 1,000 teenagers and found that half had been approached sexually across different social media by strangers. And half of those either shared pictures or were met with sextortion attempts. This is categorized as a financial crime, it’s about money being extorted. Social media platforms are traditionally not held liable for user or criminal behavior on their platform because that’s another third-party. What they are liable for is to build a safe product and build a product that has good privacy safeguards.  

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Instagram could make teens’ followers and followers lists always private by default. Right now, the second they accept a scammer’s following request, their entire follower list is exposed to that criminal and that’s the leverage they need. Instagram can at least have an option to make your friends public but make it hidden by default, so the entire social circle isn’t immediately exposed.

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Lastly, platforms should classify the Yahoo Boys under their dangerous organizations policy. On Facebook, there are dozens of public groups like “Yahoo Blackmailing Format” and tens of thousands of people are in these groups trading and sharing scam methods. How is that allowed? Criminals often use the same images and videos repeatedly across platforms. Social media platforms should be able to detect they’ve seen this image used before in a sextortion attempt and block the image. There must be more done! 

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You can hear the full discussion from the Fraud Fighter Virtual Summit in this session recording. And follow Paul on LinkedIn for so much more detailed insights into sextortion trends, threats, and how we can combat it.