Criminals are selling guides teaching scammers how to carry out ‘sextortion’ to trick victims into sending nudes. The guides are allegedly being sold on social media , showing scammers how to blackmail others, BBC News reports. They show step-by-step how to pose as young women online and lure a victim into sending sexually explicit material before blackmailing them to extort money.
This is known as sextortion, a type of blackmail that has seen a rise in recent years. It led to the National Crime Agency issuing an unprecedented warning to all schools across the UK about the dangers of sextortion as children and teens are now targeted. At least three children in the UK have ended their lives as a result of sextortion, the crime agency said.
A mother of a 14-year-old found out her teenage son had fallen victim to a sextortion gang this year. Lucy described the ‘shell-shock’ after her son received intimidating messages from scammers – despite not sending any pictures to them. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a webbrowser that supports HTML5video While he had not sent any images himself, the criminals mocked up a compromising picture and in a text threatened to share it, the BBC reports.
Lucy said: ‘It was a message, basically saying, ‘don’t shut us down. If you don’t send us money in 24 hours, we’ll send a picture to all your contacts. ‘He was shell-shocked.
And he was literally physically shaking.’ The frightened teen.
