Ep. 228: “Paul Raffile on the Sextortion Economy”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander

Trigger Warning – Beau: Okay. Just a quick heads up about this episode. We’re going to talk about sextortion and the resulting suicides that have occurred as a result of sextortion scams.

Beau: Would you be able to tell if your child was being targeted by scammers?

Paul: It’s a scam, but it’s also child sexual exploitation, it’s blackmail, it’s cyber harassment, cyberstalking, all of these crimes wrapped into one.

Beau: They target teenagers because they’re vulnerable.

Paul: Instagram is the largest directory of teens for scammers and predators out there.

Beau: And they target them a lot.

Paul: During actually one week, I think we had 11 suspicious contacts.

Beau: This week we talked to Paul Raffile, a cybercrime expert with an international following focused on sextortion. 

Paul: So we were simply there as the target, the bait for them to come after. And it worked and the scammers came to us.

Beau: Again, if sextortion or self harm are issues you find difficult to listen to, please skip this episode. 

Paul: In my view, they should start prosecuting some of these cases as, you know, negligent homicide.

Beau: I’m Beau Friedlander and this is “What the Hack?”, the show that asks, “In a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online?”

Beau: So Paul, last time I talked to you, you were having some drama with Meta. What are you doing these days?

Paul: These days, I’m still fighting the good fight to combat sextortion, tackling it from multiple angles: awareness, working with financial institutions, working with social media platforms to just tackle this from any angle that we can.

Beau: Okay, so you’re working with financial organizations. Are you like playing a… is it a cybersecurity role then?

Paul: More of an advisor consulting on different detections, different product safety features that they can consider to make sure that their platforms and their customers are not vulnerable to this sort of scam.

Inside Edition – Sextortion 1: This teenager was the victim of a vicious sextortion plot that ended in him taking his own life with a gunshot…

Scripps News – Meta: Newly unsealed court filings show the social media giant Meta may have known for years that its platforms were harming young people…

Inside Edition – Sextortion 1: Sextortion cases are on the rise, targeting young people online. In 2022, 17-year-old Jordan DeMay was homecoming king and popular at his school in Michigan. He was a victim of sextortion and took his own life. When Jordan died that morning, I found him in his bedroom, and he shot himself in his bed.

KOMO – Teens falling victim to online scams faster than seniors: Teens are being targeted on everyday apps they’re using, like Instagram and TikTok. Now, experts say the surge of Gen Z victims is alarming and shows scammers are becoming more sophisticated. No matter how tech-savvy…

Beau: Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul: Thank you for having me.

Beau: Paul is renowned for holding people’s feet to the fire and specifically Mark  Zuckerberg’s feet, the founder of Meta (once upon a time Facebook) where a lot of sex abuse material is distributed to this day. And to that point, I wanted to read something that Paul posted on LinkedIn. “Welcome to Hotel Zuckerberg. I hope you survive your stay. Please check in at the front desk. Don’t worry about showing ID. You can pretend to be anyone you like. Downstairs is our pool. In the last seven days, 1 in 18 said they were the target of unwanted sexual advances here. Don’t let that stop you from stripping down. Our valued guests love to watch.” And it goes on. That was testimony given to Congress, or it was a congressman, actually. Here’s more. “This way to your guest room. Here’s your TV. Here’s one channel, and it’ll play what we think will cause the most visceral reactions. Comedy, drama, racism, nudity, self-harm content.” That’s more testimony to congress. Here’s another one. “Your stay is free, so please watch the sponsored ads by our partners in crime. Literally. No biggie. They’re just scammers. Drug dealers, sex abusers, arms dealers, counterfeiters. 10% of our revenue comes from them.” 10%. That’s straight from Reuters. I think I’m gonna stop there. You get the picture. Paul, you are very, very good at giving an accurate picture of what’s going on out there. Maybe we should just start with the ad revenue question and scammers

Paul: Yeah, I mean, so the whole point of this metaphor, this allegory, was to show, if Facebook, if Meta, you know, if a lot of these digital companies were physical companies and the same amount of crimes, the same amount of bad activity was happening in physical locations, people would not stand for that. And, you know, with this metaphor, you know, Hotel Zuckerberg, we talk about the amount of sextortion, the amount of violence happening on these platforms that kids are exposed to, and that just doesn’t happen anywhere else in the real world. No other company would survive that sort of thing. And yeah, you know, you talk about ad revenue. One of the most damning articles just came out from Reuters a week or two ago. And from internal documents within Meta, they’re talking about how upwards of 10% potentially of their revenue comes from scam advertisements, criminal advertisements. So really just a shame that not only… I think we all knew that these bad actors were operating on the platform. I don’t think we all knew that Meta was accepting this much money from them to continue operating on the platform.

Beau: Well, here’s where the rubber hits the road for me, because we, yes, we as in the community who looks at these things and, you know, are up on the ramparts watching while everyone else just kind of whistles in the dark, have known for a long time that sex abuse material is distributed pretty easily on Meta platforms and that… I don’t wanna speak outta turn or out of place here. This is your area of expertise. My understanding though, is that Meta has been aware of it and done nothing.

Paul: Yeah. You know, from my perspective, last time I was on this program, I think there were 28,000 reported cases of financial sextortion scams targeting minors here in the U.S. Unfortunately the numbers this year are going to exceed 50,000, so the problem has basically doubled in roughly a year, year and a half. And that’s just one component of all human exploitation, child exploitation. This is just one element of that.

Beau: This is only sextortion.

Paul: Only sextortion, gonna hit 50,000 cases this year here in the us.

Beau: And is that, lemme just like clarify one more time. Is that only teenage sextortion cases?

Paul: Yes. That’s just minor cases. Nobody is tracking, publicly at least, the adult cases.

Beau: Okay. Last time we spoke you had a bunch of stuff that I think you were a little incredulous about, but you mentioned a lot of stuff that Meta was doing to remedy the problem. The fact that the numbers have doubled would suggest that whatever they were doing didn’t work.

Paul: Right. And I have a lot of criticism about some of the things that Meta says they’ve implemented in the past year that simply aren’t working.

Beau: Can you give an example of one of the things that they’ve implemented?

Paul: Sure. So one of the things Meta announced, about a year ago was- to give background, we know that in these sextortion cases, the criminals screenshot their targets’, the victims’ entire Instagram followers and friends list, and they use that as blackmail material. They say, if you block me, I’m going to send your compromising photos, videos to everybody on your contact list. So Meta knows this. They know that those contact lists are a privacy vulnerability. And if we look at Facebook, Meta’s other social media platform, there actually is a setting to keep your entire social friends list private. Now, teens don’t have that safeguard on Instagram, and that has led to basically Instagram being the best place to try to blackmail and target somebody because you can see their entire friends list. 

Beau: Now, is that still the case with the new teen accounts?

Paul: So, yes and no. Teen accounts are private by default, but the moment a teen accepts that scammer’s file request, they can see everything. They can see all of your contacts. And so it’s as easy as creating a convincing fake account. You don’t even need to slide into the DMs; the moment they accept that follow request, those lists are visible. So here’s what Meta said that they were doing. They said, in addition to making teen accounts private by default, they also said they’re going to start to hide teens’ followers and friends list from accounts that they detect as potentially being sextorters. Now, my question is, why are they not just banning those accounts originally if they think that there’s a chance of them being involved in child sextortion? But also, criminals are circumventing this. They’re adding multiple friends within the same friend group, people from the same location. So their fake accounts seem to be legitimate in circumventing this protection.

Beau: Now, one of the things that I’m somewhat obsessed with right now, I just actually did an episode about this with a focus on money laundering, is the fact that criminals, to put it in the simplest of terms, are good at criming. They’re good at what they do. And what makes them good and what makes it hard for automated systems to suss out what’s going on is they understand how automated systems work. And all you have to do is be without a guessable situation, be outside of a guessable scenario, add something, add a ghost to the machine, and you’re good. You’re not gonna get detected, or you’re probably not going to get detected. And so that’s really alarming to me that that Meta has decided to curate – I mean, it sounds like curating predators.

Paul: Well, look at it this way. Instagram is the largest directory of teens for scammers and predators out there.

Beau: So Instagram is the largest directory of teens out there for predators to tap into to commit these sextortion crimes.

Paul: That’s exactly right.

Beau: Now. You said something that surprised me. Here’s what I was thinking, you know, was that these scammers are using a larger palette of techniques to target their victims. And I thought that it would include something like personal information that’s available online so they can say, I mean, for instance, let’s say I targeted this stone. Let’s just keep it really simple, and I’m not gonna…. no scenario that could possibly be anyone. But this stone has relatives, they live in my town. And I would’ve thought that these scammers are tapping into that kind of information so they can say, oh, I see Stone. Isn’t Charles Stone and Billy Stone and Melinda Stone all relatives of yours, because I’m gonna tell them. Is that, does that happen much or is it all just like these, you know, screen grabs of their followers?

Paul: It is happening that way too. And one of the things that they can do within those Instagram friends lists is search. So we’ll see, oftentimes they will search within that friend list just for the victim’s last name. So now they’ve screenshotted the relatives, the family members of that victim. They don’t even need to go out into Google and the people search websites. Very low bar for them to even do sort of this open-source intel research. Everything they need is on the social media platform.

Beau: Okay. So, those numbers have doubled in the past year. Is there anything else that Meta implemented? I mean, I almost don’t want to hear what else Meta implemented that didn’t work. What I want to hear is, what solutions would work now? Because when you tell me the numbers have doubled, I find that alarming.

CBS – Meta issues a warning about increasing sextortion scams. Here’s how to stay safe.: We’ve got a serious warning this morning about sextortion scams. This is where scammers use fake profiles to get you to send nude photographs, and then they threaten to release those photographs unless you pay up. Well, yesterday the social media giant Meta said it removed 63,000 Instagram accounts of scammers in Nigeria, who frequently target adult men here in the U.S.

CLIP – The FBI says it’s seen an increase in the number of sextortion cases involving young kids and teens. And these victims, unfortunately typically males between the age of 14 and 17 years old. And the scammer will often start with what seems like an innocent conversation, and then it kind of escalates leading to the exchange of intimate images, and then the blackmail hits. And victims are often too embarrassed to get help. That’s the reality of the situation. So the FBI also says there’s been an alarming number of suicides tied to the cases, and they’re trying to do something about it. 

Beau: These sextortion crimes that are happening, I mean, it’s not just people saying, Hey, I have this incriminating picture of you. I’m going to give it to your father, your mother, your sister, your friend. That’s one problem and people are paying up. But the other problem is kids are dying of suicide as a result of these targeting incidents. Do you have any information about that for our listeners?

Paul: Yeah. Sadly, we know of at least 53 teenagers who have died by suicide within the last three years as a direct result of them being targeted in a sextortion scheme.

Beau: And is that all on Meta platforms?

Paul: Well, it’s actually very concentrated on a few particular platforms, Instagram being the number one platform in particular. It is the perfect platform for these blackmailers to get information about their victims, their friends list, their contacts. They’re a lot more concerned about things going out to all of their friends and followers than they are, you know, if they, if the criminal gets their home address, for example. So the top three platforms that we’re seeing sextortion occurring on right now is Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Virtually all of the cases that I’m aware of involve Meta platforms to some extent. Usually Instagram is involved.

Beau: Okay. Wow. Well, that… not to put too fine a point on it, Paul. If you follow Paul on LinkedIn, you will know that, you know, the stories are kind of nonstop. There’s a regular drum roll, sad drum roll of crimes that are occurring against teenagers with no end in sight, really. President Trump recently threatened military action in Nigeria. It had had to do with attacks on Christians and I found it disheartening actually, because I know that Zuckerberg and and Trump are at least in each other’s orbits and they listen to each other. And it would be very easy for President Trump to say, Mark Zuckerberg, the bigger problem with Nigeria is romance scams, extortion scams, and you know, all the various kinds of fraud that are run by the confraternities there. Why not just, sorry, but why not just focus on that? What have we done so far about going to the source of where these crimes are and how would you summarize first what’s going on in Nigeria?

Paul: Yeah, so we know that most of the cases of sextortion targeting teens here in the U.S. are tracing back to Nigeria. We’re also seeing other cases in the Ivory Coast, Philippines but mostly these locations. And Nigeria of course kind of has a history and a reputation relating to online scams. You know, this was the birthplace of the Nigerian Prince email scam from 20 years ago. And that’s where a lot of these scammers got their names from. They identify as Yahoo Boys and Yahoo, referring to the free yahoo.com email addresses they had back with those Nigerian Prince email scams. These days, of course they’re still working online scams on different social media platforms, and right now the crime that’s making them a whole lot of money is sextortion. So there’s been a few instances of law enforcement agencies being able to apprehend suspects in Nigeria. Unfortunately, most of these cases are only after a teen’s suicide. And we know that while just several folks have been arrested, we know several thousand at least are doing this scam. And many of these scammers rack up a hundred victims in a week easily. So lots of devastation and not a whole lot of of prosecutions.

Beau: Okay Paul, so tell me about “Hunting My Sextortion Scammer,” which is a new episode from the Untold series that Channel 4 puts out; available possibly not in your market if you’re listening in the United States, but available in different regions variously.

Paul: So this documentary was a crazy experiment that ended up working better than anyone would’ve expected. We set the trap for these sextortion scammers. We created three Instagram accounts, you know, looking like young men who are typically the target of these sorts of scams. We partnered with Jordan Stevens, who is a pop artist, a hip hop artist out in the UK, very well known. And, you know, he went through the process of voluntarily getting himself blackmailed with a sextortion scam. So he was running these accounts. We were approached by several of these sextortion scammers within a very short period of time, and Jordan got himself blackmailed. 

Beau: So he got himself blackmailed. Now doesn’t that involve getting naked?

Paul: It involves sending a photo who the criminal things could be a convincing photo of the victim.

Beau: So it could be, but it could be anything.

Paul: It could be AI-generated.

Beau: He went all the way down the rabbit hole.

Paul: That’s right. And you know, the moment that this scammer requested an intimate photo from Jordan, of course, he delayed, he tried to say no. They were very pushy, but when he sent it, immediately, that’s when the blackmail began.

Beau: And so it was not like, oh, you look great. It was, okay, cool. You owe me some money.

Paul: It was, I’m going to ruin your life within 60 seconds unless you pay me 200 pounds.

Beau: Did he pay the 200 pounds?

Paul: What we did instead was even better. This is where we came in. We had a web developer on the team help us out. We created a gift card redeem website. So we had a unique gift card redeem code. We had a link, we sent it to the scammer. All the scammer had to do was put that code into the website, and then one magic button appeared. Would you like to give this browser access to your exact location? The moment they accepted yes on that, as they mindlessly do, just like they’re accepting cookies, they’re accepting permissions, and so we got that scammer’s exact location.

Beau: Okay. That’s fantastic. So once you got their exact location, did you make a call to Africa, Interpol or what happened from there?

Paul: So we wanted to confront the scammer face to face. Jordan and the documentary crew actually flew out to Nigeria just days later and we dropped Jordan and our head of security off exactly at that pin where that location pinged from.

Beau: And was it in Lagos or was it somewhere else?

Paul: It was a remote town outside of Ibadan in Nigeria.

Beau: Oh, so far away. So where the kind of money they were making is very meaningful.

Paul: Yes. So $50 here could be a couple months of salary.

Beau: Yeah. And it’s important to bear that in mind when we talk about this. So they got to the exact location, and then what happened?

Paul: Well, we see kind of an interesting character at this location. It’s at a barber shop and the barber comes out to talk to the head of security. So, the head of security is asking questions like, you know, we’re getting phone calls. They’re coming from this location

Beau: Okay, so you start, you roll up, and you’re like, “Hey.” Do you have a camera out at this point when you say, you know, we’ve been getting phone calls from this location?

Paul: So, they have a hidden camera.

Beau: Okay, so it’s hidden. So it just looks like some random people who are not clearly… is everyone visually clearly not from Nigeria?

Paul: The head of security is a Nigerian citizen.

Beau: And he was the person who initiated the conversation?

Paul: Yes.

Beau: And was this in English or was it in another…

Paul: English. Yeah. 

Beau: Got you. Alright. So, you roll up with your head of security and he says, Hey, we’ve been getting some phone calls from this location.

Paul: Right. And then the suspect, he asked, “The call is a scam?”  And we never mentioned anything about it being a scam. Additionally during this conversation, his voice sounds like the exact voice that was blackmailing Jordan just a few days earlier on Instagram.

Beau: Now, is this a barber?

Paul: It was the barber.

Beau: So the barber who came out to speak to you had the same voice as the person who was trying to scam Jordan.

Paul: Yes. And not only the same voice. He was using the same terminology too. So we have our suspicions. Let’s call him a person of interest for now, even though the voice is pretty similar. So, we come back. Jordan, our presenter, reviews the footage with the head of security and they decide, okay, we think we have the guy. Jordan, let’s go back and confront this guy. He knows what Jordan’s face looks like. He’s been on an Instagram call with Jordan. So in these decoy accounts, we were presenting as a young adult male. We wanted to make sure that we were never sending a nude photo first. We were never asking or turning the conversation sexual first. We did not even send any friend requests first. So we were simply there as the target, the bait for them to come after. And it worked.

Beau: And all you needed to do was post an account with a young male?

Paul: Exactly. And the scammers came to us.

Beau: How fast?

Paul: We had the account active for about a month. And during that time period, during actually one week, I think we had 11 suspicious contacts.

Beau: Wow, okay. Wow.

Paul: So the second day in Nigeria is when the decision is made, okay, now it’s time for Jordan to confront the scammer. So they pack up, they get into the van, they drive out to this remote barbershop in the middle of nowhere, and turns out the barber’s not there. He is on the run. 

Beau: It’s his day off? 

Paul: No, he’s nowhere in town. They say that he’s gone into the city, coincidentally after he was questioned about his online activities just the day before. Now this is actually a critically important piece because when the barber wasn’t there, what our head of security did was he took down the barber’s phone number from somebody inside the shop or a phone number displayed at the shop. That was the critical mistake the barber made. When the head of security added his phone number to his contacts, he got that notification, “You have a new friend suggestion on Snapchat.” Now, remember, Jordan got blackmailed on Instagram, a completely separate app, but on Snapchat with the barber’s phone number, the username came up.

Beau: So basically when that phone number was entered into the head of security’s contacts, Snapchat was- which was connected to his contacts, said, you can connect to this guy. So you’re skunked. The guy’s gone, but you know you got the guy. Do you find him in person or what do you… I mean, how do you solve a problem like that in a country that is probably not that easy to find people in?

Paul: Right. So this criminal was in the wind and he was out in a different city. And of course the trip to Nigeria was only a couple days long, so we didn’t have enough time to, you know, wait around, so the guy was in the wind and we needed to confront this scammer. So Jordan gets on FaceTime with him.

Beau: Jordan calls the guy on FaceTime ’cause he has the person’s phone number and the guy doesn’t hang up immediately.

Paul: He doesn’t. He is interested in what we want to know about him and what we’re accusing him of.

Beau: So Jordan and this man are talking, and does Jordan take him to task? What happens next?

Paul:  Jordan confronts the scammer with the accusation that he blackmailed Jordan just several weeks earlier.

Beau: And what does he say to that?

Paul: And the criminal says simply, send the charges. If you have the proof, send the charges.

Beau: Goodness.

Paul: Jordan’s goal here is to have this scammer see the human impact that this crime is having on people around the world. You know, this scammer, this criminal has never seen the human impact of the crimes that he’s committed. And Jordan wants to make a point here that it is damaging the mental health and making young people suffer for this sort of crime that they’ve been victim of. So in a really powerful moment, Jordan is able to hold the scammer to account in ways that really we haven’t seen anywhere else.

Beau: And when you tell the guy about the impact he’s had, do you think he was aware of the fact that there have actually been suicides as a result of this kind of fraud?

Paul: Earlier in the documentary, Jordan actually interviewed several of these Yahoo Boys, these scammers, and asked that question: do they ever think about the suffering that they’ve caused? And for most of them, the answer is yes, but we don’t care. We are poorer than they are. We are trying to make money. We’re doing this to survive. And you know, some of them maybe are doing this to survive, even though there’s totally other things that they can do. But other of these scammers that we see, you know, they’re driving around Lagos in a brand new BMW. This is the worst scam in the world. I don’t think there’s any other financially motivated scam like this. You know, it even feels bad to call it a scam. That’s not enough, because yes, it’s a scam, but it’s also child sexual exploitation, it’s blackmail, it’s cyber harassment, cyberstalking, all of these crimes wrapped into one. So to me, even just calling it a scam, even though they are scammers, they’re the same old scammers we’ve been dealing with for 20 years, it just is a new level and a new low to this crime. And the fact that they’ve scamified child sexual exploitation is just disgusting.

Beau: What would you call it if you didn’t call it a scam? I mean, it’s fraud, but it’s more than that.

Paul: I mean, in my view, they should start prosecuting some of these cases, as, you know, negligent homicide in the case where it actually involves the death of a teen or the death of a victim. You know, if the scammer drove that person to kill themselves, they should be viewed as a negligent homicide.

Beau: What would effective legislation or regulations need to solve for when it comes to sextortion? 

Paul: In some instances, these scammers even google search the victims, they find what school they go to, they find the families, the names of family members, addresses, phone numbers, and this is amazing leverage for the blackmailers to claim that they are going to distribute the victim’s material to all these other people, all these other avenues. It’s really just a fear tactic though.

Beau: So people search sites can play a role in the targeting process. Do these guys actually ever… I assume guys; it could be anybody I guess. Do these people ever send the sextortion, you know, material to the people they’re threatening to send it to?

Paul: In these financially motivated cases, that happens in less than 10% of of cases.

Beau: And why is that? Just because they’re moving on to the next victim?

Paul: Right. Their goal is to make as much money as quickly as possible. If they decide to leak a victim’s material, they lose their leverage. They get no money, their accounts get banned. All bad things.

Beau: So the victim has to have really made them angry.

Paul: Right. So that’s why the best option really is just to block the criminals if it does happen. But the perpetrators will keep coming back, harassing them more.

Beau: With different accounts.

Paul: With different accounts, different social media platforms, different phone numbers, different email addresses. And for the first couple days of being a victim of this scam, they come at you pretty hard. They start to realize after a couple days, if you haven’t paid, it’s unlikely that that victim is going to pay. So they’ll refocus their energy, they’ll move on to new victims. They really have no intention of leaking the photos most of the time. They really just… it’s a business. They will move on to the next victim and hopefully get money from the next one.

Beau: No, but you can imagine the stress that… a teenager feels stressed getting outta bed to go to school in the morning. Add to that the stressors of someone coming at you really hard, an adult who understands that a child is ill-equipped to un to withstand that kind of stress. No wonder. I mean, no wonder they’re going around the bend. To circle back to the documentary, did Jordan experience that level of pressure?

Paul: So, yes. And of course Jordan didn’t even use his actual images, but he still felt the pressure of the criminal coming at him. It was a countdown timer from 60 down to one. We had to pay within those 60 seconds. The criminal created a photo collage of Jordan’s images and also plastered a big, bold accusation, an accusation that nobody wants to be accused of on those images, and then threaten to disseminate that instead. So the threats really do go beyond just, I’m gonna leak your photos. They turn into, I’m going to ruin your life.

Beau: They’re not just… it’s not an idle threat. I’m gonna… you’re done. You are done unless you give me that 200 pounds.

Paul: Right, and in this case, the criminal even got on Instagram video call with Jordan. So, you know, imagine a young person who just thinks he was talking to a girl his age. Now you get on the phone, you hear this person’s voice and it’s a man threatening you.

Beau: So in this case it was the actual guy, the barber, it was that person on the phone?

Paul: Yes. We’re certain of that.

Beau: Paul, what do you tell a teenager with a social media account?

Paul: You will be targeted by this scam. It will look like someone pretending to be your age. It starts out flirty. She’s gonna ask for a photo, just a selfie at first to see if she can get her way into the door, and then it’s gonna turn flirtatious even more. Those are the red flags. If someone is trying to get you to send a selfie or move you to a different platform pretty quickly, that’s a scam.

Beau: So if you’re talking to a stranger and it looks like it’s going to turn into a hot date, think three times, four times, five times,

Paul: Exactly.

Beau: AI can’t shake your hand and neither can a scammer in Nigeria. So remember that. Okay. You’re talking to an older sibling who has a younger sibling who is completely hormone-addled and needs a talking to. What do you tell them?

Paul: Yeah. So important to have those conversations preventatively before this does happen. Open up the safe space so that you know, if it does happen, you know, I like how you used the example of an older sibling. ‘Cause oftentimes from parents, they get the never send nudes, never talk to anyone online, all these nevers, but never the solution if it does happen and things go wrong. You know, I think we need to have that part two of the conversation.

Beau: Okay, now you’ve got a parent, an actual person who is responsible for a child, what are you gonna tell them?

Paul: Cover the same red flags we just mentioned, but also have that part two where, open that safe space where if something bad does happen, they feel comfortable to come to you with no judgment, no questions asked.

Beau: And one of the best ways I’ve found to do that is as a parent is to say, this happened to me when I was a kid. It has to be true, but it’s shocking the number of people out there, one in six, one in six male human beings are in one way or another sexually abused before they hit 18, one in six. That’s a real number. So, you know, throw a rock at a concert and you’re gonna hit somebody; they’ll be pissed, but you also might find that it’s somebody who’s had this problem. So I do think that adults know that this stuff exists in the world and it’s important to not skirt around the issue.

Paul: That’s right.

Beau: All right, Paul, thank you so much. The documentary Hunting my Sextortion Scammer is a new episode of the Channel 4 series UNTOLD. You can see Paul in the episode wherever the series is shown. And now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep safe on and offline. Sextortion and digital coercion rely on social engineering, which is basically trickery bolstered by targeted reconnaissance, that’s research all pointed at exploiting a vulnerability. That might involve deploying personally identifiable information about you and your family that is already available online. Scammers may leverage a school name, a relative’s name or occupation. They combine that with some fact about where you live, a store, somewhere you like to hang out; all that made possible using information online. That you posted on social media, that’s been scraped by people search sites. The result? A threat that feels immediate and catastrophic. Here’s a step in the right direction: Talk. Keep the lines of communication open. Tell funny stories about yourself. Make a fool of yourself. Here’s why: Your child needs to know not only why they shouldn’t send any content whatsoever to a stranger–whether that’s a sext or a compromising photo, but that if they do, they can tell you about it. No big deal. Yes, it hurts, so scream. The scammer’s only leverage is shame. The cycle of coercion is broken the minute there’s no secret. Scream. Teach your kids to scream when it hurts, and show up for them. Never pay. That’s like chumming for sharks at the beach where you intend to swim after lunch, after eating a gigantic meal. Just use common sense, and I know that eating a big meal and swimming is a myth, but still. Chumming for sharks, not a myth. Actively work to remove your personal information from people search sites and data brokers. Consider asking your extended family to do the same. If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can use DeleteMe or another service to do it. That’s why we’re here. Finally, have frank conversations about the threat on social media. I mean, okay. They’re on social media. That’s not going to stop being the case, but you can talk about why it can be a dangerous place, and they can roll their eyes all day long. The bottom line is be open, be ready, and try to stay safe. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you again next week. What the Hack is produced by Beau Friedlander (that’s me) and Andrew Steven, who also edits the show. What the Hack is brought to you by DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes it quick and easy and safe to remove your personal data online, and was recently named the number one pick by New York Times’ Wirecutter for personal information removal. You can learn more about DeleteMe if you go to joindeleteme.com/wth, that’s joindeleteme.com/wth and if you sign up there on that landing page, you will get a 20% discount. I kid you not, a 20% discount. So yes, color me phishing, but it’s worth it.

Learn more:

• See where your data is exposed with our free scan.
• Learn more about data brokers and how they misuse your data.
• Learn more about sextortion scams and discover related resources.