Once you pay I will delete the photo’: How scammers are snaring hundreds of children each month
Hundreds of teenagers are being targeted by overseas crime gangs who threaten to leak explicit photographs unless they pay hundreds of dollars, The Sydney Morning Herald has learnt, days after revealing two Nigerian men were arrested over a vicious sextortion plot that drove a NSW boy to suicide.
The family of another child victim say tech giants “have blood on their hands” as digital gift cards become a vital tool for international scammers, while authorities say the online companies have “failed” to take meaningful action.
The Australian Centre To Counter Child Exploitation received an average 300 reports of sextortion each month for most of 2023. That number dropped to about 110 earlier this year, but is rising again, a spokesman from the Australian Federal Police said.
Intelligence collected by the AFP estimates only one in 10 victims report sextortion, meaning thousands of children are likely suffering in silence each year.
Young men are the overwhelming majority of victims, and gift cards, along with cryptocurrency, are the preferred payment methods for the scammers.
This week, the Herald reported a teenage boy in NSW had taken his own life after being hounded to death by scammers late last year.
If [tech companies] are allowing these scams to happen, and given that child killed himself six months ago, they have blood on their hands.John, a family member of one victim
The scammers had posed as a young woman and messaged the boy, most likely among many others, on social media with increasingly sexualised messages.
Once the boy sent an explicit image in reply, the scammers began pressuring him into paying them $500, using iTunes gift cards, or they would leak the image to his friends and family.
The boy killed himself hours later as the pressure mounted, NSW Police said. Six months later, NSW Police, along with the Australian Federal Police and FBI, had two men arrested in Nigeria for the plot.
About the same time as the boy took his own life, the Herald can reveal, a second young man in NSW was being targeted in an identical scam.
Nigerian men have been charged after an Australian boy took his own life following an alleged sextortion attempt.
John, speaking under a pseudonym to protect his family member, told the Herald the scammers contacted the boy on iMessage and convinced him to send compromising photographs.
They then threatened to expose the teenager for a few hundred dollars of gift cards.
The teenager was distraught and the family went to police.
“It’s heartbreaking; it has been hard on us all,” John said.
“Our heart goes out to the other children targeted.”
Around the end of last year John complained to Apple, asking if gift cards and messages could be traced back to the scammers. John said he wanted to know who had targeted his family.
Apple told him they had been aware of such scams. John was incensed. “If [tech companies] are allowing these scams to happen, and given that child killed himself six months ago, they have blood on their hands,” John said. “The perpetrator in Nigeria might be some poverty-stricken person, coaxed into it by criminal gangs, but companies worth billions and trillions don’t stop it – then they have greater culpability.”
Apple did not respond to direct questions about whether they could trace gift cards or whether they had worked with police to track sextortion scammers.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said tech giants across the board had “failed to take organised and systemic action” against sextortion.
“There is no defence for inaction by online service providers,” Grant told the Herald.
“They can deploy, at scale, language analysis technology to proactively flag accounts using known expressions, phrases, hashtags and syntax to entrap targets.”
Grant said the same profile pictures and names were repeatedly used to target victims, so tech giants should be using software to detect and flag profiles that use them.
Grant said users who were banned should be excluded from a company’s entire suite of services and prevented from reregistering.
Apple pointed customers to a support website that explains its cards are used in a “string of scams”.
The page, which does not mention sextortion nor any specific type of scam, urges customers not to provide the numbers on the back of iTunes cards to unknown people.
“Once those numbers have been provided to the scammers, the funds on the card will probably be spent before you are able to contact Apple or law enforcement,” the website reads.
Lifeline: 13 11 14 ( lifeline.org.au), the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467 and suicidecallbackservice.org.au) and beyondblue (1300 22 4636 and beyondblue.org.au)
