Children become victims of sextortion

HOUSTON – Jennifer and David McDaniel say their 14-year-old son Evan met someone online, recorded an incriminating video of himself and shared it with someone he thought was a girlfriend. Only it wasn’t, and they wanted money or they would share the photos.

This practice is called sextortion. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children defines sextorsion as “a form of child sexual exploitation in which children are threatened or blackmailed, most often with the ability to share nude or sexual images of them with the public, by a person who demands additional sexual content, sexual activity, or money from a child.”

“The language and strength of the threats continued to grow,” said David McDaniel.

“Your family, they are destroyed. Your life is ruined,” adds Jennifer McDaniel. This video will go viral. And you might as well kill yourself because your life is over.

Evan committed suicide.

The Houston Police Department reports that between January 2020 and Monday this week, the Property and Financial Crime Unit was working on 45 cases of intimate relationships with adults.

Officer James Taylor is part of HPD’s finance and cybercrime unit. He says the department receives 20 reports a week, and all of them are about adults who met someone on a dating app.

“We may submit legal requests to these social networking websites or other websites that have contacted them,” Taylor said. However, if it ever gets out of the country, there’s not much we, the Houston Police Department, can do. This is where we can recommend filing with the FBI and ICE.gov where is their online repo system.

The FBI usually intervenes if a case is reported to them by local law enforcement or through partners such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

At the federal level, the FBI Assistant Special Agent in charge of Criminal Investigation in Houston says the agency received 10 times more sexual extortion allegations in the first half of 2022 than in all of 2021.

“In 2022 alone, we received over 7,000 sexual extortion allegations from the FBI and DHS,” Assistant Special Agent David Martinez said. “Many of the perpetrators of these crimes are abroad, making it extremely difficult to investigate. Some of them are based in Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and even the Philippines.”

Sextortion is not new, but Martinez says the goals have changed.

“The numbers indicate that most of them are young male teenagers. Typically between the ages of 13 and 17,” Martinez said.

Attackers spread a wide network in search of impressionable teenagers on all social and gaming platforms.

“They create clone accounts. They hack into unsecured accounts to imitate, steal images, and then create a copycat account that makes the victims believe they are talking to someone they know and trust,” Martinez said. “Once they have that trust, they extract the material, and that’s when the actual extortion aspect of the crime starts.”

Martinez says they act like girls the same age as their victims. He says that most cases of sextortion go unreported because of the stigma around it.

“This is one of the reasons why young people tend to make up the largest proportion of victims due to the shame factor, but they are less likely to report the actual crime,” he said. “And, unfortunately, that has led to an increase in victim-related suicides.”

The FBI says there are several ways to find out if this is happening to your child:

• Withdrawal from family and friends

• Dropping grades or dropping out of typical activities

• Abnormal behavior such as increased anxiety, fear, or unexplained anger

• Psychological, emotional or physical trauma

• Self-damaging ideas or actions

• An inexplicable sense of urgency to “escape” to another location to satisfy the perpetrator’s demands

Martinez adds that if your child shows any of these signs, it’s important to sit him down and talk about it.

“Firstly, it is very important for us to note that children are victims of this crime, in fact they are victims,” Martinez said. “Understanding that when anyone comes across this type of material, whether or not you consider them a friend, a confidant, that information should be flagged as soon as possible.”

“Parents need to repeat to their children that they are the victims here and the blame lies with the perpetrator, the perpetrator trying to blackmail the children,” said Callahan Walsh of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Parents or guardians should be aware of computer applications, Internet websites and online forums that children use; try to regularly monitor children’s activities related to the Internet; if your child has a profile on a social network, make sure it is closed.

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