sextortion
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Facebook and Instagram will help prevent the spread of teens' intimate photos
Meta is clamping down on sextortion by letting people flag intimate photos.
UK sentences porn site sextortionist to over six years in prison
A British court just imprisoned one of the most aggressive sextortionists in recent memory. Zain Qaiser has been sentenced to six years and five months behind bars after pleading guilty to a scheme that blackmailed porn site visitors in over 20 countries by spreading malware-laden ads. The campaign would impersonate regional police (such as the FBI) and claim that victims who clicked the ads had committed an offense requiring a fine between $300 and $1,000. Qaiser worked with a Russian crime group that reportedly pocketed most of the money, but he still made over £700,000 (about $914,000) -- and prosecutors believe he has even more money stashed in offshore accounts.
The FBI hacked an alleged sextortionist with a dummy video
Buster Hernandez, a 26-year-old from California, is believed to have extorted sexual images from children as young as 12. Unsealed documents relating to the FBI investigation reveal that the predator has been operating since 2014. It's believed that Hernandez, under the alias Brian Kil, used threats of violence and domestic terrorism to coerce children into sending him sexual images.
Proposed bill would make doxxing a federal crime
While many internet harassment tactics, such as doxxing and swatting, are considered illegal under state criminal laws, the coverage is often indirect. More often than not, law enforcement has difficulty identifying and prosecuting these types of crimes. But now, Representatives Katherine Clark (D-MA), Susan Brooks (R-IN) and Patrick Meehan (R-PA) want to criminalize these behaviors at the federal level with the Online Safety Modernization Act of 2017.
Facebook is dealing with a massive revenge porn problem
If it wasn't already apparent that Facebook faces a lot of challenges when grappling with sensitive material, it is now. As part of a slow but steady file leak, the Guardian has revealed that Facebook has faced at least one recent surge in revenge porn and sexual extortion cases -- 54,000 potential cases just in January. The company ended up disabling over 14,000 accounts involved in these disputes, 33 of which involved children. It's not clear how this compares to other periods (Facebook doesn't divulge specific figures), but that's no small amount.
21-year-old charged with sextortion crimes
A 21-year-old from New Hampshire has been charged with a range of crimes surrounding a grisly extortion scheme involving underage girls. The Department of Justice accuses Ryan J. Vallee of hacking into several teenagers' social media accounts, holding them hostage unless they sent him explicit images of themselves. If they didn't comply, he would threaten the girls with "additional harm," although after obtaining the pictures, he distributed them to others anyway. In addition, Vallee is said to have accessed the victim's Amazon accounts and ordered "items of a sexual nature," which were then sent to their homes, causing untold distress.
The FBI needs your help finding 250 sextortion victims
Lucas Michael Chansler is a 26-year-old sexual predator sentenced to 105 years in prison after pleading guilty to multiple counts of child pornography production. Over several years, he tricked roughly 350 teenage girls from 26 states into giving him explicit pictures of themselves by posing as a teen boy and befriending them online before threatening to distribute the photos on social media. He was eventually tracked down to his Jacksonville, Florida home when one victim reported his extortion attempts to the FBI and the The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. While the Feds have been able to locate more than 100 of his underage victims, nearly 250 young women have yet to be identified. And that's where you come in.
