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Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

154 points by fromthegut 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fromthegut 2y ago
Black Mirror. S3 E3
- k8svet 2y ago
  Bit different imo. If some scammer sends me my bro's penile pic, I'm gonna delete it and warn him. If the scammer sends me proof he was consuming illegal, immoral CSAM, I'm having a vastly different reaction. The shame is the key to this scam. The intersection of (especially teenaged) insecurity, and America cultures nonsensical relationship to sex and shame, is tragic.
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    The shame of cheating / adultery is a massive leverage point these scammers prey on.
  - EnigmaFlare 2y ago
    Teenage boys won't necessarily know the distinction between what's shameful and what's illegal, or the bigger political beliefs around CSAM. Don't you think you're perpetuating the fear of sexuality by effectively threating to cause serious harm to teenagers for looking at the wrong kinds of pictures? Why is there such a binary classification of "no shame" and "calling the cops"? Different countries' laws put that distinction in different places. Remember this could be a minor himself who hasn't actually done any harm to anyone.
    - k8svet 2y ago
      I don't think you should've been downvoted, I reread my comment last night and realized I didn't make it as clear. I mentioned that shame (of sexuality/nudity/vulgarity) as a contrast to fear of being caught doing something illegal, because I think we should work to remove that shame. Or at least that magnitude of it. I have my own relationship and journey with this American-puritanical bs shame. Life's short, lots of people are horny, no one really cares about your junk that much anyway. But yeah, I didn't have any of that perspective as a teenager.
      - EnigmaFlare 2y ago
        I kind of agree with the shame thing. It is a problem and puts people at risk of this sort of extortion. On the other hand, what's the alternative? Without shame or laws, would we end up with a lot of public exhibitionism? Would that be fine because nobody has any strong feelings about it? If society became like that, would it devalue sex and reduce many people's enjoyment of it? I suppose one advantage is that sexual abuse of children would be nearly impossible by definition, and in practice because those children would themselves already be desensitized to it. Perhaps this is one of those difficult areas where personal freedom impacts general long term wellbeing of society in a subtle and vague way.
  - vintermann 2y ago
    Yes, this is maybe something that is true that we can tell victims of this scam/attack: If I get an anonymous mail with a picture of any sort, I'm not going to look at it. No matter what they say it is. This goes for other platforms too. There are fortunately few ways for random strangers to cram images I don't want to see into my eyes. Most of the ones that do exist (e.g. making a social media profile and trying to "add" me) are automatically scanned for porn by the social network site.
  - lifestyleguru 2y ago
    UK and US: "All porn (copyrights) belongs to us" also UK and US: "We don't even wank to it"
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    That's arguably kind of a weak twist ending to that episode; it would actually basically still work if the material had been inoffensive. Throughout the episode, the viewer is meant to _assume_ it's just shame.
    - k8svet 2y ago
      Agreed. I don't really know why I thought the distinction mattered yesterday.
RecycledEle 2y ago
[flagged]
- filoleg 2y ago
  And how exactly is a local cop in the US supposed to enforce the law against someone who (both legally and physically) is a resident of a country on the other side of the globe (Nigeria)? Asking because that’s the situation the article in the OP is talking about, and I don’t see how any of what you said applies to it.
  - latentsea 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - RecycledEle 2y ago
    > And how exactly is a local cop in the US supposed to enforce the law against someone who (both legally and physically) is a resident of a country on the other side of the globe (Nigeria)? > Asking because that’s the situation the article in the OP is talking about, and I don’t see how any of what you said applies to it. The perpetrator I am thinking of was a foreign national, but was a student in the USA, attending a US university. The problem is law enforcement.
    - junon 2y ago
      Eh yes, and no. A lot of precincts don't have cybercrime resources and can't do much. Especially in the US, you'd be surprised at how little cooperation different agencies have. Best to contact a cyber division of some sort, especially sexual harassment task forces and non-profits. They're usually able to get the ball moving. Local PDs, especially in Metro areas, simply don't have the resources. It's a sad reality.
impish9208 2y ago
[dead]
0dayz 2y ago
Pay wall but making some quick assumption this is people who are impersonating girls/guys which lures young guys with sending nudes and then proclaims that their nudes will be sent everywhere maybe even used to be sent to women/young girls so that when the authorities crackfown it'll be the young guy facing the crime, but this can all be averted by the victim paying. I.e. extortion. Beyond it being a truly despicable crime, it's interesting how this extortion hadn't changed much since the early 2000s the only difference is that it's done on a larger scale and probably more done for money than for other nefarious reasons.
aaron695 2y ago
Same story in Australia, 16 year old boy killed himself, different two men in Lagos https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68720247 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68720247 I'm not real confident this is solvable with law enforcement in a world where the police press release is - "located in a slum in Nigeria with a population of 25 million people"
- colechristensen 2y ago
  Sure it is. If a country can’t find and enforce a law or extradite someone for doing such a thing, order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country or charge the message carrier itself, especially if minors are involved. Like if Facebook is being a safe haven for Nigerian extortionists, either they block Nigeria or Australia blocks Facebook.
  - thrownaway561 2y ago
    if they do that they will just use VPNs. you can't stop this no matter what, you just have to educate people and hope they don't fall victim.
    - djaouen 2y ago
      Sanction VPNs that allow this behavior. Force them to use botnets, which means they have to interact with other criminals. :)
    - colechristensen 2y ago
      Then blackhole the VPNs when they're involved in crime and make them share legal financial responsibility for the crimes they enable. Eventually you keep walking down this line until you write laws that local ISPs are required to globally blackhole countries which otherwise evade law enforcement.
      - orwin 2y ago
        I can make a VPN for like 3 euro on AWS (thinking about it, I can probably do it with their free tier offer). I could probably do the same for a bit more work and study on most PaaS.
neonate 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240416235606/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-sextortion-teen-suicides/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240416235606/https://www.bloom... https://archive.ph/I9jm2 https://archive.ph/I9jm2
dockerd 2y ago
Meta didn't accept emergency request from police and needed county magistrate order to help assist in investigation. "Meta has a portal for police to file requests to preserve records of accounts connected to criminal investigations. Like other social media companies, it has to hold the records—including emails, IP addresses, message transcripts and general usage history—for 90 days. It only hands over user data if it’s ordered to do so by a court. There’s one way to expedite the request: file it as an emergency, meaning a child could be harmed or there’s risk of death. Larson believed this case qualified. He told Meta that a 17-year-old was already dead, and there was a high probability other kids were in danger, too. *Meta declined his request within an hour, he says. “The request you submitted does not rise to the level of an emergency,” the company responded.*"
- Animats 2y ago
  Meta was correct. "Exigent circumstances" to the 4th amendment warrant requirement did not apply, because there was no known potential victim at risk. So the cops needed to have a judge sign a warrant. Didn't take long.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
    Legally correct maybe, but morally?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Animats 2y ago
      If its not worth getting a judge out of bed, it's not an emergency.
    - stefs 2y ago
      that's a slippery slope and exactly why we have a legal framework. "give me hsbauauvhabzbs private messages because he might send CP and thus it's your moral duty!" can be applied to everything. "oh, we didn't find any CP but we now still have their private correspondence on file."
abrookewood 2y ago
God this is awful. If you have kids, go talk to them. I've already spoken to mine. Aside from the usual (don't send nudes; be careful on the Internet), I also told them that if something like this does happen, it isn't worth your life: everyone masturbates, it isn't anything shameful and I'll still love you anyway.
hannofcart 2y ago
While my heart goes out to all the victims' families, what are platforms like Facebook supposed to do here? Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping. The sad fact is that desperate people exist. And these desperate people are willing to do despicable things to make a buck.
- bikemore 2y ago
  If Facebook were at all a force for good in this world, maybe I'd agree with you. But given the litany of other social ills they are directly or indirectly responsible for, I'm fairly confident you could nuke them tomorrow and the world would be a better place. So "Facebook should abort itself" is one option.
  - nextlevelwizard 2y ago
    And then people would move to yet another social media site and nothing changes
    - bikemore 2y ago
      Good, I'm glad we've decided to just let the world rot because why bother. Great solution.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping. I rather assumed they already did monitor chat, in order to target adverts, A/B test, handle abuse reports, filter spam, etc. Even if FB says it has "end to end encryption", I can't fully believe them due to the political pressure under the banner "terrorism/kids get hurt" is immense regardless of us here regarding that as thought terminating cliché from the intelligence agencies.
- olliej 2y ago
  Facebook does monitor - and sell - all user data. You don’t get to say “we will read your messages to sell ads, we will straight up sell your message history to other companies, but no we can’t do anything to protect users from trivially detectable scams.
SoftTalker 2y ago
In this day and age, if you fall for something like that, just refuse to pay and say you'll tell people it's an AI fake. I think the days of this sort of scam being very effective are over, or will be soon.
- dt3ft 2y ago
  This should be the top comment as it may in fact save someones life.
- HaZeust 2y ago
  Why do we keep thinking that people will wise up to AI-generated content just because it'll eventually be mass-produced and anyone can do it? Anyone can write absolutely anything with little check and balance on substance, and MILLIONS still believe tabloids and headlines. We've been able to reliably edit photos/video/film for 80 years with an exponential increase in its efficiency within the last 30 - and we still have millions that would take a photo or video's substance at face-value.
  - solumunus 2y ago
    You say that but I’ve yet to see an AI deep fake have any real impact so far. At least in the west, the political ones I’ve seen really haven’t got much traction and were quickly dismissed by the mainstream. Sure, there will always be idiots on the fringe who will believe anything that aligns with their current beliefs, there’s little we can do about that, but so far I’m surprised there hasn’t been an AI deepfake that didn’t fizzle within days. I guess we’re early in the game, so time will tell.
    - timeon 2y ago
      Small country, but it has already started: https://www.wired.com/story/slovakias-election-deepfakes-show-ai-is-a-danger-to-democracy/ https://www.wired.com/story/slovakias-election-deepfakes-sho... It was shared on social media just before elections during 'moratorium' [0]. There was no time or place to dismiss it by mainstream. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence
throehcifj 2y ago
Why is it called "scam" and "fraud"? It is typical revenge porn, sexual abuse and distribution of child pornography. There is a strong network to support rape victims, and it should be used for such cases.
- MrStonedOne 2y ago
  [dead]
- wpietri 2y ago
  It is called a scam because that's what the perps are going for. Their goal is to extract money. From the article: "The price was $300. He transferred the money via Apple Cash and pleaded to be left alone. But it wasn’t enough. Now Dani wanted $800." Maybe you know different teenagers than me, but I'm not expecting that the boys described here would be big on joining a rape support group.
  - throehcifj 2y ago
    Intentions of attackers are irrelevant, important is what they do! Victims are not killing themselves over $300, but over revenge porn! I would absolutely join rape support group, but there are none for men. Maybe the is the real problem. At least they should get break from school, or help with relocation! And correct labeling would help with school bullies. Reposting some "scam" pictures has zero punishment, spreading revenge porn on other side... Reposting dick pics of exes, or groups like "Are we dating the same guy?" are sadly way too common!
    - wpietri 2y ago
      It's true that scammers use many different techniques, and I agree that NCP is in play here. But something can be more than one thing at once. This is a scam.
      - throehcifj 2y ago
        > But something can be more than one thing at once. Perhaps it is scam and revenge porn at the same time! And $300 scam is the smaller part! There are many precedents, but with girls! This tone policing "men can never be a victim of a sexual crime" is getting old.
andersa 2y ago
I don't understand what would motivate someone to ever send an explicit photo of themselves to a stranger. The whole premise of this scam makes no sense. Like, is this not the most basic of the basics of online safety?
- wpietri 2y ago
  The short answer is horniness. They are hoping to get some. And indeed, as I understand it, they've received what they think are explicit photos of someone else, so they believe they are in a reciprocal context. If people were all that good at being rational about safety in the face of possible sexytimes, it's true this wouldn't happen. And we wouldn't have STDs or unintended pregnancies, either. But as the man says, life finds a way.
  - user_7832 2y ago
    To add to the fact, these are teenagers. They already aren't well known for rational thought or low levels of horniness.
- QuiDortDine 2y ago
  It's not just teenagers, my friend's brother fell prey to this. His life is one ongoing mental health crisis. These people are truly the scum of the earth, their scam only works on vulnerable people by design. Disgusting.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > It's not just teenagers, No. Apparently it also happens with british Member of Parliament. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/04/senior-tory-mortified-after-reportedly-passing-mps-data-to-dating-app-contact https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/04/senior-tory...
    - defrost 2y ago
      To be fair the scammers did lead him on with an unsolicited picture of a tractor sans engine cover.
gttalbot 2y ago
Why would Facebook not just block messages from Nigeria to rando North American towns at this point? Shouldn't the network analysis required to detect this sort of crime ring be a slam-dunk at this point? I don't get how this is still even possible.
- jmopp 2y ago
  On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West Africa due to being kidnapped/robbed etc and someone local tries to contact the family back home, but all the messages end up getting blocked.
  - orthoxerox 2y ago
    Something simple like a face match or even an email unlock if you connect to the account from an unusual location should work. A lot of websites do that already. So a volunteer doctor from the US opens their phone in Lagos, gets challenged, answers, Meta now knows that Nigerian IPs or whatever VPN they use are fine.
  - dclowd9901 2y ago
    This seems like such a contrived example. By all accounts the Dr would probably be in better shape if the kidnappers weren’t able to contact their family.
    - jmopp 2y ago
      It's not the kidnappers trying to contact the family in this case. It's the clinic administrator who doesn't know why their doctor hasn't shown up for a week
- petepete 2y ago
  My parents' home phone used to receive several scam calls a week from India. There was no way to stop them short of giving up the landline, which is what I did. I can't believe phone companies (in the UK) don't provide better protection, even a registry of whitelisted numbers, that could be set for the old/vulnerable.
DoreenMichele 2y ago
Some thoughts I've had for years: A. My understanding is an underage teen who takes a nude selfie and sends it can be charged with distributing "child porn." This is a serious problem and should not be true. If other people forward it, they should be charged, but a teenager should not get in legal trouble for making a nude selfie and sending it privately. B. We need to culturally get over a lot of our hangups about certain things. His girlfriend was attending church. The church should be telling kids "This is not worth killing yourself over." C. We somehow need to come up with reasonable accommodation for the reality that teens have phones and budding sexualities and these two things are colliding horrifically in a legal and cultural system strongly rooted in assuming "child porn" is made solely by abusive adults and not willingly by underage teens who don't think it's a big deal at the time the photo is snapped. Taking a nude selfie should be safer than baring your body in person. No risk of STDs or pregnancy are involved. And yet we've turned it into this hugely dangerous thing for anyone who hasn't spent years thinking about sexual morality who isn't prepared to say to law enforcement and the world "Nudes of me? Big fucking deal." No idea how to further any of those things, but this is hardly the first article I've read about teen selfies being involved in extreme levels of harsh consequences that I just think morally should not happen and I think have roots in cultural and legal stuff going bad places in part because we aren't keeping up with the times.
- chr1 2y ago
  AI generating realistic nude images from normal images will further these things. Because then there will be nudes for everyone, it will be impossible to prove what is real and what is fake, and therefore pointlessness of chasing of 'illegal" numbers will become obvious to more people.
  - DoreenMichele 2y ago
    My knee-jerk reaction is that probably some people know what you look like naked. So one means to check: If it's recent, compare it to your actual body. On the other hand, bodies change over time, so it gets easier to say "That 10 year old pic? No, not real." (Unless it's extremely attractive. Then enthuse about how gorgeous you once were, I guess, and see if people buy that.)
MarkSweep 2y ago
I’m not a teenage boy, but I got targeted by one these. While it was misdirected (they were trying to blackmail me with someone else’s photos), the whole thing was quite disturbing. Also iMessage really does not seem to be well designed to handle abuse. Your only option is to block, which is a couple of taps away from a conversation. The block does not instantly take effect cross device, so you still get messages on your Apple Watch until you reboot it. Your only option for reporting anything is when deleting a conversation, and all you can do is say it’s spam.
- junon 2y ago
  A friend of mine was also targeted though they didn't have a real photo of him. They claimed to have hacked his webcam and had some blurry thing printed out, but he doesn't have a webcam. He called in a panic and I told him to ignore it. Nothing ever came of it (because in this case, how could it - and we're both adults, I convinced him even if it were true why would it matter - again, highly case specific but he agreed it wouldnt). I doubt the same would be true in all cases, just wanted to share.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
    A common scam is this combined with ‘proof’ in the form of passwords, the passwords often come from hacked databases such as LinkedIn from 2012, or others reported on have I been pwned (pun not intended)
junon 2y ago
In my opinion, those two (or three) deserve way longer than 15 years. This wasn't some act of desperation. This was just pure, unfiltered evil that IMO cannot be "corrected".
boffinAudio 2y ago
This could all be solved if the OS vendors would add a 'share my childs screen' function to their operating systems. These incidents happen in isolation - make it possible for an adult to actually .. you know .. have oversight over their childrens online activities and it would be less dangerous.
- master-lincoln 2y ago
  It would also be solved if care takers wouldn't let a child do stuff unsupervised on the internet. Or if a care taker educated a child about dangers on the internet. Do you really think care takers would watch their kids screens remotely all the time and then such horrific events wouldn't happen? I think it wouldn't help at all if that feature existed
  - boffinAudio 2y ago
    As a parent of two teenage boys, I would definitely prefer to be able to occasionally tune into whats going on with my kids screens. Definitely. And, I would definitely have caught things sooner if I'd had that ability. (Disclaimer: yes, we have been victims of these kinds of scams.)
- troq13 2y ago
  This type of software is often abused by people to spy on their partners...
analyte123 2y ago
The victim's parents would technically have been guilty of a felony if this happened today, by failing to lock up the firearm and the minor causing injury to another, including their own self [1]. Michigan's safe storage law was not in effect in 2022, but the truth stands that guns really need to be locked up when there are teens around. For some reason the narrative has been on 6-year-olds accidentally picking up a gun, but that type of accidental child firearm death is absolutely dwarfed by teen firearm suicides. [1] https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhhs/Safety-and-Injury-Prevention/Firearm-Safety/Firearm-Storage-Penalties.pdf https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhh...
Uptrenda 2y ago
I see this as a two fold problem: (1) Most young people are insecure as anything and have unhealthy self-esteem. (2) Culturally the west is very (and I mean very) ashamed of nudity. Problem (1) isn't something that can be done half-assed. The kid will need a healthy family, friends, support system. They will need to be free of traumatic influences... While (2) I see as being more practical. If you look at European countries they are much more naturalist regarding nudity. Like Dutch have their Freikörperkultur (FKK) free body movement where there's many places where you can go and do activities nude. Mixed gender saunas where people are naked are common. Then there's Japan where parents commonly bathe with their children. It teaches them not to be ashamed of their body. We don't really have anything like that in the west. It's really quite dangerous because its just like: do we expect literal teenagers to practice good opsec when adults can't even get that shit right?

154 points by fromthegut 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fromthegut 2y ago

Black Mirror. S3 E3

k8svet 2y ago
Bit different imo. If some scammer sends me my bro's penile pic, I'm gonna delete it and warn him. If the scammer sends me proof he was consuming illegal, immoral CSAM, I'm having a vastly different reaction. The shame is the key to this scam. The intersection of (especially teenaged) insecurity, and America cultures nonsensical relationship to sex and shame, is tragic.
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  The shame of cheating / adultery is a massive leverage point these scammers prey on.
- EnigmaFlare 2y ago
  Teenage boys won't necessarily know the distinction between what's shameful and what's illegal, or the bigger political beliefs around CSAM. Don't you think you're perpetuating the fear of sexuality by effectively threating to cause serious harm to teenagers for looking at the wrong kinds of pictures? Why is there such a binary classification of "no shame" and "calling the cops"? Different countries' laws put that distinction in different places. Remember this could be a minor himself who hasn't actually done any harm to anyone.
  - k8svet 2y ago
    I don't think you should've been downvoted, I reread my comment last night and realized I didn't make it as clear. I mentioned that shame (of sexuality/nudity/vulgarity) as a contrast to fear of being caught doing something illegal, because I think we should work to remove that shame. Or at least that magnitude of it. I have my own relationship and journey with this American-puritanical bs shame. Life's short, lots of people are horny, no one really cares about your junk that much anyway. But yeah, I didn't have any of that perspective as a teenager.
    - EnigmaFlare 2y ago
      I kind of agree with the shame thing. It is a problem and puts people at risk of this sort of extortion. On the other hand, what's the alternative? Without shame or laws, would we end up with a lot of public exhibitionism? Would that be fine because nobody has any strong feelings about it? If society became like that, would it devalue sex and reduce many people's enjoyment of it? I suppose one advantage is that sexual abuse of children would be nearly impossible by definition, and in practice because those children would themselves already be desensitized to it. Perhaps this is one of those difficult areas where personal freedom impacts general long term wellbeing of society in a subtle and vague way.
- vintermann 2y ago
  Yes, this is maybe something that is true that we can tell victims of this scam/attack: If I get an anonymous mail with a picture of any sort, I'm not going to look at it. No matter what they say it is. This goes for other platforms too. There are fortunately few ways for random strangers to cram images I don't want to see into my eyes. Most of the ones that do exist (e.g. making a social media profile and trying to "add" me) are automatically scanned for porn by the social network site.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
  UK and US: "All porn (copyrights) belongs to us" also UK and US: "We don't even wank to it"
- rsynnott 2y ago
  That's arguably kind of a weak twist ending to that episode; it would actually basically still work if the material had been inoffensive. Throughout the episode, the viewer is meant to _assume_ it's just shame.
  - k8svet 2y ago
    Agreed. I don't really know why I thought the distinction mattered yesterday.

RecycledEle 2y ago

[flagged]

filoleg 2y ago
And how exactly is a local cop in the US supposed to enforce the law against someone who (both legally and physically) is a resident of a country on the other side of the globe (Nigeria)? Asking because that’s the situation the article in the OP is talking about, and I don’t see how any of what you said applies to it.
- latentsea 2y ago
  [flagged]
- RecycledEle 2y ago
  > And how exactly is a local cop in the US supposed to enforce the law against someone who (both legally and physically) is a resident of a country on the other side of the globe (Nigeria)? > Asking because that’s the situation the article in the OP is talking about, and I don’t see how any of what you said applies to it. The perpetrator I am thinking of was a foreign national, but was a student in the USA, attending a US university. The problem is law enforcement.
  - junon 2y ago
    Eh yes, and no. A lot of precincts don't have cybercrime resources and can't do much. Especially in the US, you'd be surprised at how little cooperation different agencies have. Best to contact a cyber division of some sort, especially sexual harassment task forces and non-profits. They're usually able to get the ball moving. Local PDs, especially in Metro areas, simply don't have the resources. It's a sad reality.

impish9208 2y ago

[dead]

0dayz 2y ago

Pay wall but making some quick assumption this is people who are impersonating girls/guys which lures young guys with sending nudes and then proclaims that their nudes will be sent everywhere maybe even used to be sent to women/young girls so that when the authorities crackfown it'll be the young guy facing the crime, but this can all be averted by the victim paying. I.e. extortion. Beyond it being a truly despicable crime, it's interesting how this extortion hadn't changed much since the early 2000s the only difference is that it's done on a larger scale and probably more done for money than for other nefarious reasons.

aaron695 2y ago

Same story in Australia, 16 year old boy killed himself, different two men in Lagos https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68720247 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68720247 I'm not real confident this is solvable with law enforcement in a world where the police press release is - "located in a slum in Nigeria with a population of 25 million people"

colechristensen 2y ago
Sure it is. If a country can’t find and enforce a law or extradite someone for doing such a thing, order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country or charge the message carrier itself, especially if minors are involved. Like if Facebook is being a safe haven for Nigerian extortionists, either they block Nigeria or Australia blocks Facebook.
- thrownaway561 2y ago
  if they do that they will just use VPNs. you can't stop this no matter what, you just have to educate people and hope they don't fall victim.
  - djaouen 2y ago
    Sanction VPNs that allow this behavior. Force them to use botnets, which means they have to interact with other criminals. :)
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    Then blackhole the VPNs when they're involved in crime and make them share legal financial responsibility for the crimes they enable. Eventually you keep walking down this line until you write laws that local ISPs are required to globally blackhole countries which otherwise evade law enforcement.
    - orwin 2y ago
      I can make a VPN for like 3 euro on AWS (thinking about it, I can probably do it with their free tier offer). I could probably do the same for a bit more work and study on most PaaS.

neonate 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240416235606/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-sextortion-teen-suicides/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240416235606/https://www.bloom... https://archive.ph/I9jm2 https://archive.ph/I9jm2

dockerd 2y ago

Meta didn't accept emergency request from police and needed county magistrate order to help assist in investigation. "Meta has a portal for police to file requests to preserve records of accounts connected to criminal investigations. Like other social media companies, it has to hold the records—including emails, IP addresses, message transcripts and general usage history—for 90 days. It only hands over user data if it’s ordered to do so by a court. There’s one way to expedite the request: file it as an emergency, meaning a child could be harmed or there’s risk of death. Larson believed this case qualified. He told Meta that a 17-year-old was already dead, and there was a high probability other kids were in danger, too. *Meta declined his request within an hour, he says. “The request you submitted does not rise to the level of an emergency,” the company responded.*"

Animats 2y ago
Meta was correct. "Exigent circumstances" to the 4th amendment warrant requirement did not apply, because there was no known potential victim at risk. So the cops needed to have a judge sign a warrant. Didn't take long.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
  Legally correct maybe, but morally?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Animats 2y ago
    If its not worth getting a judge out of bed, it's not an emergency.
  - stefs 2y ago
    that's a slippery slope and exactly why we have a legal framework. "give me hsbauauvhabzbs private messages because he might send CP and thus it's your moral duty!" can be applied to everything. "oh, we didn't find any CP but we now still have their private correspondence on file."

abrookewood 2y ago

God this is awful. If you have kids, go talk to them. I've already spoken to mine. Aside from the usual (don't send nudes; be careful on the Internet), I also told them that if something like this does happen, it isn't worth your life: everyone masturbates, it isn't anything shameful and I'll still love you anyway.

hannofcart 2y ago

While my heart goes out to all the victims' families, what are platforms like Facebook supposed to do here? Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping. The sad fact is that desperate people exist. And these desperate people are willing to do despicable things to make a buck.

bikemore 2y ago
If Facebook were at all a force for good in this world, maybe I'd agree with you. But given the litany of other social ills they are directly or indirectly responsible for, I'm fairly confident you could nuke them tomorrow and the world would be a better place. So "Facebook should abort itself" is one option.
- nextlevelwizard 2y ago
  And then people would move to yet another social media site and nothing changes
  - bikemore 2y ago
    Good, I'm glad we've decided to just let the world rot because why bother. Great solution.
ben_w 2y ago
> Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping. I rather assumed they already did monitor chat, in order to target adverts, A/B test, handle abuse reports, filter spam, etc. Even if FB says it has "end to end encryption", I can't fully believe them due to the political pressure under the banner "terrorism/kids get hurt" is immense regardless of us here regarding that as thought terminating cliché from the intelligence agencies.
olliej 2y ago
Facebook does monitor - and sell - all user data. You don’t get to say “we will read your messages to sell ads, we will straight up sell your message history to other companies, but no we can’t do anything to protect users from trivially detectable scams.

SoftTalker 2y ago

In this day and age, if you fall for something like that, just refuse to pay and say you'll tell people it's an AI fake. I think the days of this sort of scam being very effective are over, or will be soon.

dt3ft 2y ago
This should be the top comment as it may in fact save someones life.
HaZeust 2y ago
Why do we keep thinking that people will wise up to AI-generated content just because it'll eventually be mass-produced and anyone can do it? Anyone can write absolutely anything with little check and balance on substance, and MILLIONS still believe tabloids and headlines. We've been able to reliably edit photos/video/film for 80 years with an exponential increase in its efficiency within the last 30 - and we still have millions that would take a photo or video's substance at face-value.
- solumunus 2y ago
  You say that but I’ve yet to see an AI deep fake have any real impact so far. At least in the west, the political ones I’ve seen really haven’t got much traction and were quickly dismissed by the mainstream. Sure, there will always be idiots on the fringe who will believe anything that aligns with their current beliefs, there’s little we can do about that, but so far I’m surprised there hasn’t been an AI deepfake that didn’t fizzle within days. I guess we’re early in the game, so time will tell.
  - timeon 2y ago
    Small country, but it has already started: https://www.wired.com/story/slovakias-election-deepfakes-show-ai-is-a-danger-to-democracy/ https://www.wired.com/story/slovakias-election-deepfakes-sho... It was shared on social media just before elections during 'moratorium' [0]. There was no time or place to dismiss it by mainstream. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence

throehcifj 2y ago

Why is it called "scam" and "fraud"? It is typical revenge porn, sexual abuse and distribution of child pornography. There is a strong network to support rape victims, and it should be used for such cases.

MrStonedOne 2y ago
[dead]
wpietri 2y ago
It is called a scam because that's what the perps are going for. Their goal is to extract money. From the article: "The price was $300. He transferred the money via Apple Cash and pleaded to be left alone. But it wasn’t enough. Now Dani wanted $800." Maybe you know different teenagers than me, but I'm not expecting that the boys described here would be big on joining a rape support group.
- throehcifj 2y ago
  Intentions of attackers are irrelevant, important is what they do! Victims are not killing themselves over $300, but over revenge porn! I would absolutely join rape support group, but there are none for men. Maybe the is the real problem. At least they should get break from school, or help with relocation! And correct labeling would help with school bullies. Reposting some "scam" pictures has zero punishment, spreading revenge porn on other side... Reposting dick pics of exes, or groups like "Are we dating the same guy?" are sadly way too common!
  - wpietri 2y ago
    It's true that scammers use many different techniques, and I agree that NCP is in play here. But something can be more than one thing at once. This is a scam.
    - throehcifj 2y ago
      > But something can be more than one thing at once. Perhaps it is scam and revenge porn at the same time! And $300 scam is the smaller part! There are many precedents, but with girls! This tone policing "men can never be a victim of a sexual crime" is getting old.

andersa 2y ago

I don't understand what would motivate someone to ever send an explicit photo of themselves to a stranger. The whole premise of this scam makes no sense. Like, is this not the most basic of the basics of online safety?

wpietri 2y ago
The short answer is horniness. They are hoping to get some. And indeed, as I understand it, they've received what they think are explicit photos of someone else, so they believe they are in a reciprocal context. If people were all that good at being rational about safety in the face of possible sexytimes, it's true this wouldn't happen. And we wouldn't have STDs or unintended pregnancies, either. But as the man says, life finds a way.
- user_7832 2y ago
  To add to the fact, these are teenagers. They already aren't well known for rational thought or low levels of horniness.
QuiDortDine 2y ago
It's not just teenagers, my friend's brother fell prey to this. His life is one ongoing mental health crisis. These people are truly the scum of the earth, their scam only works on vulnerable people by design. Disgusting.
- krisoft 2y ago
  > It's not just teenagers, No. Apparently it also happens with british Member of Parliament. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/04/senior-tory-mortified-after-reportedly-passing-mps-data-to-dating-app-contact https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/04/senior-tory...
  - defrost 2y ago
    To be fair the scammers did lead him on with an unsolicited picture of a tractor sans engine cover.

gttalbot 2y ago

Why would Facebook not just block messages from Nigeria to rando North American towns at this point? Shouldn't the network analysis required to detect this sort of crime ring be a slam-dunk at this point? I don't get how this is still even possible.

jmopp 2y ago
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West Africa due to being kidnapped/robbed etc and someone local tries to contact the family back home, but all the messages end up getting blocked.
- orthoxerox 2y ago
  Something simple like a face match or even an email unlock if you connect to the account from an unusual location should work. A lot of websites do that already. So a volunteer doctor from the US opens their phone in Lagos, gets challenged, answers, Meta now knows that Nigerian IPs or whatever VPN they use are fine.
- dclowd9901 2y ago
  This seems like such a contrived example. By all accounts the Dr would probably be in better shape if the kidnappers weren’t able to contact their family.
  - jmopp 2y ago
    It's not the kidnappers trying to contact the family in this case. It's the clinic administrator who doesn't know why their doctor hasn't shown up for a week
petepete 2y ago
My parents' home phone used to receive several scam calls a week from India. There was no way to stop them short of giving up the landline, which is what I did. I can't believe phone companies (in the UK) don't provide better protection, even a registry of whitelisted numbers, that could be set for the old/vulnerable.

DoreenMichele 2y ago

Some thoughts I've had for years: A. My understanding is an underage teen who takes a nude selfie and sends it can be charged with distributing "child porn." This is a serious problem and should not be true. If other people forward it, they should be charged, but a teenager should not get in legal trouble for making a nude selfie and sending it privately. B. We need to culturally get over a lot of our hangups about certain things. His girlfriend was attending church. The church should be telling kids "This is not worth killing yourself over." C. We somehow need to come up with reasonable accommodation for the reality that teens have phones and budding sexualities and these two things are colliding horrifically in a legal and cultural system strongly rooted in assuming "child porn" is made solely by abusive adults and not willingly by underage teens who don't think it's a big deal at the time the photo is snapped. Taking a nude selfie should be safer than baring your body in person. No risk of STDs or pregnancy are involved. And yet we've turned it into this hugely dangerous thing for anyone who hasn't spent years thinking about sexual morality who isn't prepared to say to law enforcement and the world "Nudes of me? Big fucking deal." No idea how to further any of those things, but this is hardly the first article I've read about teen selfies being involved in extreme levels of harsh consequences that I just think morally should not happen and I think have roots in cultural and legal stuff going bad places in part because we aren't keeping up with the times.

chr1 2y ago
AI generating realistic nude images from normal images will further these things. Because then there will be nudes for everyone, it will be impossible to prove what is real and what is fake, and therefore pointlessness of chasing of 'illegal" numbers will become obvious to more people.
- DoreenMichele 2y ago
  My knee-jerk reaction is that probably some people know what you look like naked. So one means to check: If it's recent, compare it to your actual body. On the other hand, bodies change over time, so it gets easier to say "That 10 year old pic? No, not real." (Unless it's extremely attractive. Then enthuse about how gorgeous you once were, I guess, and see if people buy that.)

MarkSweep 2y ago

I’m not a teenage boy, but I got targeted by one these. While it was misdirected (they were trying to blackmail me with someone else’s photos), the whole thing was quite disturbing. Also iMessage really does not seem to be well designed to handle abuse. Your only option is to block, which is a couple of taps away from a conversation. The block does not instantly take effect cross device, so you still get messages on your Apple Watch until you reboot it. Your only option for reporting anything is when deleting a conversation, and all you can do is say it’s spam.

junon 2y ago
A friend of mine was also targeted though they didn't have a real photo of him. They claimed to have hacked his webcam and had some blurry thing printed out, but he doesn't have a webcam. He called in a panic and I told him to ignore it. Nothing ever came of it (because in this case, how could it - and we're both adults, I convinced him even if it were true why would it matter - again, highly case specific but he agreed it wouldnt). I doubt the same would be true in all cases, just wanted to share.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
  A common scam is this combined with ‘proof’ in the form of passwords, the passwords often come from hacked databases such as LinkedIn from 2012, or others reported on have I been pwned (pun not intended)

junon 2y ago

In my opinion, those two (or three) deserve way longer than 15 years. This wasn't some act of desperation. This was just pure, unfiltered evil that IMO cannot be "corrected".

boffinAudio 2y ago

This could all be solved if the OS vendors would add a 'share my childs screen' function to their operating systems. These incidents happen in isolation - make it possible for an adult to actually .. you know .. have oversight over their childrens online activities and it would be less dangerous.

master-lincoln 2y ago
It would also be solved if care takers wouldn't let a child do stuff unsupervised on the internet. Or if a care taker educated a child about dangers on the internet. Do you really think care takers would watch their kids screens remotely all the time and then such horrific events wouldn't happen? I think it wouldn't help at all if that feature existed
- boffinAudio 2y ago
  As a parent of two teenage boys, I would definitely prefer to be able to occasionally tune into whats going on with my kids screens. Definitely. And, I would definitely have caught things sooner if I'd had that ability. (Disclaimer: yes, we have been victims of these kinds of scams.)
troq13 2y ago
This type of software is often abused by people to spy on their partners...

analyte123 2y ago

The victim's parents would technically have been guilty of a felony if this happened today, by failing to lock up the firearm and the minor causing injury to another, including their own self [1]. Michigan's safe storage law was not in effect in 2022, but the truth stands that guns really need to be locked up when there are teens around. For some reason the narrative has been on 6-year-olds accidentally picking up a gun, but that type of accidental child firearm death is absolutely dwarfed by teen firearm suicides. [1] https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhhs/Safety-and-Injury-Prevention/Firearm-Safety/Firearm-Storage-Penalties.pdf https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhh...

Uptrenda 2y ago

I see this as a two fold problem: (1) Most young people are insecure as anything and have unhealthy self-esteem. (2) Culturally the west is very (and I mean very) ashamed of nudity. Problem (1) isn't something that can be done half-assed. The kid will need a healthy family, friends, support system. They will need to be free of traumatic influences... While (2) I see as being more practical. If you look at European countries they are much more naturalist regarding nudity. Like Dutch have their Freikörperkultur (FKK) free body movement where there's many places where you can go and do activities nude. Mixed gender saunas where people are naked are common. Then there's Japan where parents commonly bathe with their children. It teaches them not to be ashamed of their body. We don't really have anything like that in the west. It's really quite dangerous because its just like: do we expect literal teenagers to practice good opsec when adults can't even get that shit right?