A 17-year-old Michigan resident fell victim to sextortion before taking his life. Scammers approached Jordan on Instagram and tricked him into providing them explicit photographs of himself, after which they attempted to blackmail him until he committed suicide. His mother, Jenn Buta, has yet to touch his jerseys, clothes, posters, or bedsheets, which are just how he left them.
Jenn said to BBC, “It still smells like him.”
To get him to share explicit photographs of himself, the scammers flirted with him while posing as a girl of his age and sending intimate photos. Then, in exchange for his not showing the photos to his friends online, they threatened to blackmail him for several hundred pounds.
ALSO READ | Job scams, sextortion see uptick but Chinese loan app frauds decline, reveals government data Jordan threw in as much cash as he could and threatened to die by suicide if the extortionists shared the pictures.
The young boy communicated for fewer than six hours before taking his life.
“There's actually a script online,” Jenn told BBC.
According to the BBC, the fraudsters were two Nigerian brothers named Samuel and Samson Ogoshi, who were later deported to the United States.
They admitted admission to counts of child exploitation and are awaiting punishment.
ALSO READ | Safer Internet Day 2024 | Meta expands efforts to help teens combat sextortion Using the TikTok account Jordan created for her, Jenn has become a well-known advocate for young people, spreading awareness of the risks associated with sextortion.
According to US criminal statistics, the number of incidents more than quadrupled to 26,700 last year, and at least 27 boys killed themselves in the previous two years.
Reports of financial sextortion in the United States, between October 2022 and March 2023, involving juveniles increased by at least 20% compared to the same six-month period the previous year, the FBI said in January.
Researchers and law enforcement organisations identify West Africa—especially Nigeria as a hub for attackers' bases, BBC reported.
Meanwhile, the
Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) reported that in May 2024, there were an average of 7,000 cybercrime complaints filed daily, up 60.9% from 2022–2023 and 113.7% from 2021–2023.
The great majority of them are being documented as incidents of sextortion, in which victims are deceived into paying fraudsters crores of rupees.
