{"id":15378,"date":"2024-05-15T06:25:25","date_gmt":"2024-05-15T13:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=15378"},"modified":"2024-06-14T06:04:18","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T13:04:18","slug":"chelsea-asked-for-nude-pictures-then-the-sextortion-began-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=15378","title":{"rendered":"“\u2018Chelsea\u2019 Asked for Nude Pictures. Then the Sextortion Began”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Young men are being coerced into sending naked pictures to scammers pretending to be women \u2014 who then demand money. The consequences can be devastating.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Sarah Maslin Nir, May 15, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Read the World Campaign Issue of the Week post on The Times series Exploited<\/em> here<\/a>.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Instagram message popped up from a girl named Chelsea: \u201cHowdy.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

David didn\u2019t know anyone named Chelsea, but he clicked through her profile: She had brown hair and a nice smile; under her name was a quote from the Bible. He thought it was sort of weird that she was messaging him, a stranger, in the middle of a workday, but her pouty selfies made that easy to ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was hesitant when she asked him to chat, but soon her flirty messages escalated to a volley of explicit pictures, and David, a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, got carried away. When she asked him for a nude, he hardly thought twice, he said. He slipped into the bathroom at the New Jersey hospital where he works, took a picture and hit send.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within seconds, the threats began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David\u2019s phone lit up with messages: pictures he had sent with his genitals exposed alongside screenshots of his Instagram followers with whom he shares a last name \u2014 his family. \u201cShe said: I\u2019m demanding $500, if not I\u2019m going to send it to all of these people,\u201d said David, who asked that only his middle name be used to protect his privacy. \u201cThen she started a countdown.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there was no Chelsea. The real person behind the account, David said, was a man who, over the course of three fraught days, inadvertently revealed he was in Nigeria as he demanded hundreds of dollars to keep David\u2019s pictures private. As he paid up, David joined the thousands of people cowed under a new scam that has exploded over the past three years to become the fastest-growing cybercrime, according to both the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Called financial sextortion, it is a uniquely modern riff on the romance scams of yesteryear in which the lonely were seduced into parting with their money by people posing as suitors. In other versions of the scheme that focus on women and girls, explicit images are typically coerced for sexual gratification or to be sold as pornography. This new iteration preys on young men and teenage boys, and the images are held as ransom \u2014 often for as little as a few hundred dollars, to be paid typically through cryptocurrency or even gift cards from the sender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But cybercrime agencies caution not to be deceived by the seemingly small stakes. Many victims caught in this scam are minors \u2014 of the 13,000 reports of financial sextortion the F.B.I. received between October 2021 to March 2023, a vast majority of them involved boys. And though David\u2019s dealings with \u201cChelsea\u201d cost him $750 (as well as spiraling anxiety and a deep sense of humiliation), the consequences for young boys can be devastating. According to the F.B.I., between January 2021 and July 2023, at least 20 teenagers, when faced with the threat that an embarrassing photo would ruin their lives, have killed themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey can\u2019t understand temporary versus forever,\u201d said Mary Rodee, the mother of Riley Basford, a 15-year-old from Potsdam, N.Y., who in 2021 killed himself just hours after he was enticed by a scammer who posed as a girl his age on Facebook. After Riley sent nude photos of himself, the scammer demanded $3,500 to have them returned. Since her son\u2019s death, Ms. Rodee, an elementary schoolteacher, has become an outspoken educator about sextortion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also has joined the ranks of parents and cybersecurity experts lobbying for better protections from the social media that the scammers use. \u201cIt is really hard to just live with knowing that these people who did this to Riley continue to get away with it,\u201d Ms. Rodee said. \u201cI just can\u2019t understand, how can the tech companies not immediately stop them? Because they could.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n