HEADER GLOBAL GOES FINANCIAL HERECRIME REVIEW
How does financial sextortion of minors work?
TCOs based in West Africa including groups like the“ Yahoo Boys” are running large-scale financial sextortion rackets targeting children. 4 A study of NCMEC financial sextortion reports found that 47 % were linked to either Nigeria or the Ivory Coast. 5 Nigerian sextortion scammers flaunt their wealth on social media to recruit new blackmail conspirators and take a cut of the recruit’ s profit. 6
Offenders connect with teenage male victims through social media, online games and messaging apps by creating profiles that appear to be young women. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that predators may hack or purchase social media accounts known to a victim or create copycat accounts to appear as if they are someone the victim already knows. 7
While posing as teenage girls, the predator secretly records explicit video calls with children or asks them to send sexually explicit pictures. In addition, some victims report that perpetrators hacked the victim’ s device or social media account to obtain intimate images or were threatened with an artificial intelligencegenerated deepfake image.
After receiving sexually explicit content from a child, the offender threatens to release the material to friends, family, schoolmates and / or social media followers unless the victim provides payment. The West African TCOs work with co-conspirators in the victim’ s country to collect and remit sextortion proceeds overseas.
What are the financial steps in financial sextortion of minors?
1. Victim payments
The perpetrators of financial sextortion of minors understand that their victims are children and therefore have access to a smaller subset of financial products or ways to transfer value than adults. For example, extorters rarely direct kids to pay ransom by credit card or by writing a check.
Instead, perpetrators coerce kids to pay ransom via financial products that teens commonly have access to: peer-to-peer( P2P) and payment apps, gift cards and increasingly gaming tokens / currency.
Graphic 1: How sextortionists demand payment
How did financial sextorionists demand payment from kids?
Payment apps
Physical cash, in-person
Payment Type Gift cards
Online gaming currency
Source: Thorn. 8 Visualization by: Alison Jimenez 9
As shown in Graphic 1, extorters demand ransom via P2P
10, 11 and payment apps over 75 % of the time.
Cryptocurrency Other
80
60
40
20
0
Percentage of Respondents
84 acamstoday. org