Yates, in the Radio-Canada web series Corde sensible, paraphrases a typical sextortion threat: If the target can be coerced into taking off their clothes and/or masturbating, images are collected, and the ransom demands soon follow.
What hetero man – or anybody else who likes the attention of young, hot women and is innocent enough to fall for the come-on – wouldn’t jump at the chance? Once they do, the first step into a sextortion trap has been taken. Within minutes of an intended victim accepting the request, the fake account will invite the target to join her in a sexy webcam chat, such as on Skype or Google Hangouts. It starts with a friend request from a young, hot babe. Yates believes that the fake profiles are just the first layer of a massive sextortion scheme. Some of the fake accounts are massive: they have 100,000, 200,000, or even 500,000 followers. They knew that the accounts were fake because the photos had been stolen from Instagram accounts or personal Facebook profiles. To find out how the networks spin their webs, Radio Canada journalists Marie-Eve Tremblay and Jeff Yates – an expert in online disinformation who’s found and mapped the connections between fake profiles to learn how they support each other – conducted a months-long investigation into what he believes is a “massive network.” Not to downplay the suffering caused by such operators in any way – there have been multiple suicides related to such cases – but those lone wolves are rank amateurs compared with the massive network of fraudulent accounts that catfish male victims using stolen photos of young women and adolescent girls. We’ve covered plenty of lone-wolf sextortionists: one who targeted underaged girls until he was caught by investigators’ booby-trapped video the guy who preyed on Miss Teen USA and 150 others and a former US Embassy worker who sextorted, phished, broke into email accounts, stole explicit images and cyberstalked hundreds of women around the world from his London office. Fake Facebook profiles of hot women who invite targets to join them in sexy webcam masturbation sessions – sessions that lead to image capture and extortion – are part of a “three-tiered, industrial process” that allows a sophisticated criminal network to “find, filter and defraud victims, all the while protecting itself,” according to an investigation done by Radio Canada.
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