It was just 13 years ago when Amanda Todd shocked the world with her suicide, which she blamed squarely on sextortion. In the last four years, 38 teens have suicided in the USA because of sextortion. It hardly even gets reported anymore.
Sextortion scams led 38 US teens to die by suicide over five years: ‘I have yr nudes and everything needed to ruin your life’
Thirty-eight teenage boys in the US have died by suicide since 2021 after falling victim to “sextortion” scammers, a top cybercrimes investigator has told The Post.
Two networks have been identified as the main ones behind the sick schemes: Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys, who do it for profit, and the US-Europe-centered 764 gang, who are, more worryingly, sexual sadists, according to Paul Raffile, who has personally investigated many of the suicides.
“These criminals can add 100 kids [per] Instagram account and hope that 30 accept the friend request and hope that 10 actually engage with them. So it’s really a numbers game,” Raffile told The Post, adding the Nigerian operation has thousands of members.
“Law enforcement needs to get ahead of this before teen suicides, not after.”
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said in May that it receives almost 100 reports of financial sextortion a day and was then aware of 36 suicides since 2021. The number of reports they receive tripled between 2022 to 2024 to 33,000 a year, according to their statistics.
The FBI warns that it has interviewed victims as young as 8 and sextortion affects children of both genders and all socio-economic groups.
Raffile says all the suicides he has looked into link back to Yahoo Boys, also known as BM Boys (for blackmail).
The network “bombs” American teens with fake accounts pretending to be flirtatious female peers, using sophisticated tactics to then coerce their victims into sending illicit photos.
They then demand money, first in a single payment and then more, while threatening to release the photos they have been sent.
The African scammers demand money via Cash App or gift cards, Raffile said. In fact, he noted how scams exploded in the fourth quarter of 2021, after Cash App unveiled teen accounts.
“Cash App was the first of the peer-to-peer payment platforms to roll out teen accounts. That’s exactly when they started to get targeted by these international, financially motivated criminals,” Raffile said.
Cash App did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
A 2024 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute found Instagram was the most common platform for sextortion schemes to take place, followed by Snapchat.
A spokesperson for Instagram’s parent company, Meta, told The Post they work with law enforcement and “have spent years understanding how [criminals] operate so we can develop the right protections.” Snapchat did not respond to a request for comment.
That report also tracked the brazen way Yahoo Boys coordinate to target a victim, share tactics on creating fake social media profiles, discuss AI tools, and workshop blackmail scripts — referred to as “BM format.”
One script shared among scammers on Scribd suggested introductory questions like, “What do you like to do for fun?” before the scammers are shown how to entice the victim into sharing explicit photos.
Once obtained, they write, “Hey I have ur nudes and everything needed to ruin your life.”
“Please stop,” one victim wrote back with tearful emojis in a screenshot reviewed by The Post, before the scammer heartlessly fired back: “I am gonna make sure all of your friends get your s–t and I am never gonna unsend them until you pay me bro.”
“Stop you’re scaring me, please stop, I’m so scared,” the victim responded.
Most of this information was, shockingly, posted for anyone to see.
“They were called Yahoo blackmailing groups on Facebook. They were public. And they were sharing the pretty young girls’ images to catfish people with,” said Raffile.
Arrests for African sextortion scammers are extremely rare; Raffile estimated there have been only three or four. In 2023, two Nigerian brothers — Samuel and Samson Ogoshi, 22 and 20 — were extradited to the US and sentenced to 17 years for their role in running the sextortion ring connected to the suicide of 17-year-old Michigan teen Jordan DeMay.
Californian Jonathan Kassi, 25, was sentenced to 18 months for his role in the 2022 suicide of Ryan Last, 17, another sextortion victim. Authorities say Kassi was working as a money mule for Ivory Coast scammers who have not been indicted.
On November 6, West Virginia honor roll student Bryce Tate, 15, became the latest victim to take his life just three hours after scammers contacted him pretending to be a local 17-year-old girl, according to law enforcement and family members who spoke to The Post.
After The Post’s coverage of Bryce Tate’s horrific story gained widespread traction, on Tuesday a bill was introduced to make sextortion a federal crime.
“When these offenders are eventually caught by law enforcement, whether here or abroad, our nation’s prosecutors struggle to appropriately charge them, as there are currently no federal laws that explicitly address sextortion.
“My commonsense, bipartisan ‘Stop Sextortion Act’ would federally criminalize sextortion and ensure these heinous criminals are finally brought to justice,” One of the bill’s sponsors, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, told The Post.
The Nigerian scammers are brazen to the point of making memes mocking their victims — referred to as “clients” — and celebrating their success in depraved criminal acts.
In one video reviewed by The Post, a scammer showed off a new Mercedes-Benz he bought with money extorted from American teens. Other videos featured scammers dancing around in piles of cash.
Other scammers shared screenshots on social media of the torment they are inflicting.
Federal law enforcement appears to have put more resources into domestic sextortion rings — namely the online “terrorist” outfit 764, described in US Justice Department press statements as a decentralized “criminal organization of Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVE)” that uses online channels to share “extreme gore media” and child sex abuse material with juveniles.
Unlike the Yahoo Boys, 764’s motivation appears sexual rather than financial. 764 also tend to target girls and LGBTQ people, rather than boys, said Raffile.
Individuals connected with the group conduct “coordinated extortions” of teenagers and “blackmail them to comply with the group’s demands” which often include, “self-mutilation, online and in-person sexual acts, harm to animals, sexual exploitation of siblings and others, acts of violence, threats of violence, suicide, and murder,” a US Attorney’s Office press release from November said about the group.
“Their main aim is to traumatize you,” a young woman who claimed she was victimized by 764 told Wired magazine in 2024. “They want to make you suffer. And for you to take your own life. They really are very sadistic people.”
The 764 group — which Meta says is banned from its platforms, along with associated entities — emerged in 2021, founded by a bullied 15-year-old dropout named Bradley Cadenhead of Stephenville, Texas, who went by the online moniker “Felix.”
Cadenhead learned techniques of exploiting minors from a group on the decentralized site Discord, where people’s chat groups are private between members, according to the magazine.
764 are the first three digits of Cadenhead’s 76401 zip code. Cadenhead was a troubled and disruptive child, fascinated by gore and torture from an early age. When he was ten, his mother moved out and began “drinking a lot and partying,” she later told authorities.
“I stopped caring about everything,” Cadenhead later told probation officers, according to a 2024 Washington Post report.
Following a tip and a home search, Cadenhead was arrested in May 2023 and convicted of possessing child porn. He is currently serving an 80-year prison sentence.
“Very rarely do we get a chance to look evil in the face,” prosecutor Jett Smith told a judge at Cadenhead’s sentencing. “This may be one of those times.”
In one encounter he pressured a 10-year-old girl to send explicit photos of herself, according to the Washington Post.
Law enforcement estimates 764, which splintered into various offshoots following Cadenhead’s arrest, has thousands of members globally with hundreds being “hardcore” involved in the operation, according to Wired.
One of those affiliated groups goes by Greggy’s Cult. On Dec. 3, five men were charged with child exploitation and conspiracy to produce child pornography among other crimes.
In April, two core members of the 764 network — Prasan Nepal, 20, of North Carolina and Leonidas Varagiannis, 21, an American living in Greece — were arrested and charged with operating an international child exploitation enterprise. Varagiannis is currently fighting extradition back to the US.
Cybercrimes experts and law enforcement say protecting teenagers from these scams starts at home with teens having social media accounts set to private and with parents educating their children about sextortion threats.
What’s even more important to know, one cop who spoke to The Post said, is that the scammers lie — they have no intention of ever transmitting the illicit photos. Echoing advice from the FBI, they said a teen who finds himself engaged with a scammer should immediately cease communication and alert their parents and law enforcement.
“We need awareness campaigns directed at this,” Raffile said. “If you know how a scam works, you’re far less likely to fall for it. And what’s happening in these financial sex extortion cases, it is the same red flags. It is the same scripted messages. It’s the same crime over and over and over again. It’s entirely predictable.”
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