HOUSTON – Jennifer and David McDaniel say their 14-year-old son, Evan, met someone online, recorded a compromising video of himself and shared it with who he thought was a girl. Only it wasn’t and they wanted money, or they would share the pictures.
The practice is called sextortion. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children defines sextortion as “a form of child sexual exploitation where children are threatened or blackmailed, most often with the possibility of sharing with the public a nude or sexual images of them, by a person who demands additional sexual content, sexual activity or money from the child.”
“The language and the force behind the threats kept escalating,” said David McDaniel.
“Your family, they’re ruined. Your life is ruined,” Jennifer McDaniel adds. “This video is going to go viral. And you might as well kill yourself because your life is over.”
Evan died by suicide.
In Houston, the Houston Police Department says the Property and Financial Crimes division has worked on 45 adult intimate material cases between January 2020 to Monday of this week.
Officer James Taylor is part of HPD’s Financial and Cybercrimes division. He says the division gets 20 reports a week all involving adults who met someone on a dating app.
“We can send legal requests to these social media websites or different websites that contacted them,” Taylor said. However, if it ever leads to outside of the country there’s not much we as the Houston Police Department can do. That’s where we can recommend filing with the FBI and ICE.gov where that’s their online repot system.”
The FBI typically gets involved if a case is reported to them by local law enforcement agencies or through partners like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
On a federal level, the FBI’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Criminal Branch in Houston says the agency has received over 10 times the amount of sextortion allegations in the first half of 2022 than all of 2021.
“Between the FBI and the DHS, we’ve received over 7,000 allegations of sextortion in 2022 alone,” said Assistant Special Agent in Charge David Martinez. “Many of the offenders that are carrying out these crimes are overseas which makes it extremely difficult to investigate. A number of them are based in the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and as far away as the Philippines.”
Sextortion isn’t new but Martinez says the targets have changed.
“What the numbers have indicated is that a large portion of them are young adolescent males. Generally, from around the age of 13 to 17,” said Martinez.
The perpetrators cast a wide net, looking for impressionable teens across all social and gaming platforms.
“They create clone accounts. They hack unsecure accounts to mimic, to steal images and then create a copycat account which leads the victims to believe they’re talking to somebody they know, and they trust,” Martinez said. “Once they have that trust they elicit the material and then that is when the actual extortion aspect of the crime begins.”
Martinez says they are acting like girls around the ages of their victims. He says most of the incidents of sextortion go unreported because of the shame around it.
“It’s one of the reasons why young men are generally the largest portion of the individuals targeted because of the shame factor but they’re less likely to report the actual crime,” he said. “And unfortunately, this has led to an increase in suicides related to the victims.”
The FBI says there are some ways to recognize if this is happening to your child:
- · Withdrawal from family and friends
- · Drop in grades or a withdrawal from typical activities
- · Abnormal behaviors, such as elevated anxiety, fear, or unexplained anger
- · Psychological, emotional, or physical trauma
- · Self-harming ideations or actions
- · Unexplained sense of urgency to “escape” to a different location to meet perpetrator’s demands
Martinez adds if your child is showing any of these signs it is important to sit them down and talk about the matter.
“First, it is very important for us to note that the children are the victims of this crime, are actually victims,” Martinez said. “Understanding that when anybody is eliciting this type of material, regardless of if you believe them to be a friend, a trusted person that, that information be flagged as soon as possible.”
“Parents should reiterate to their children that they are the victim here and the blame is on the perpetrator, the criminal trying to extort the children,” said Callahan Walsh with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Parents or caregivers should educate themselves on computer applications, Interne websites, and online forums kids use; try and regularly supervise kids’ internet-related activities; if your child has a social media profile – make sure it is set to private.
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