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09-04-2024
ABUJA/ SYDNEY: Two people have been arrested in Nigeria over an alleged sextortion attempt against an Australian schoolboy who took his own life.
Australian police say the teenage victim had traded explicit images with a person online before they began making threats and demanding money.
After a global investigation, the pair allegedly responsible were tracked down in Nigeria, where they will face court.
Police say sextortion particularly of young people is dramatically rising.
Details of the boy’s age or where he lived in New South Wales (NSW) have not been released publicly to protect his family’s privacy.
New South Wales Police described the alleged extortionists as “young males” and said they had threatened to send photos to the teenager’s friends and family if he did not pay them AU$500 (£260; $330).
“The messages are horrific. They’re aggressive and put a lot of pressure on the boy to pay the money,” the police force’s cyber-crime commander, Matthew Craft, told the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH).
The boy died by suicide on the same evening, late last year.
Australian detectives worked with their counterparts in South Africa and Nigeria to trace the suspected perpetrators to a slum in Nigeria. The media has contacted the Nigerian police for comment.
Evidence that the pair had also tried to extort other people was found on their phones, according to the SMH. They have been charged over the alleged extortion of the Australian boy, but not his death.
There have been several cases in Canada and the US in recent years of teenagers who have killed themselves after being targeted by sextortion plots.
Det Supt Craft said his team had seen a “huge spike” in sextortion cases and has appealed for anyone targeted to contact police.
“(They) are up nearly 400% in the last 18 months,” he said in a statement.
“We want young people to continue to report these cases, and to never be embarrassed to talk to police.
“Sextortion is a very real crime… These arrests in Nigeria show just how far police are willing to go to seek justice on behalf of our young community.”
Although Nigeria has tried to crack down on internet fraud in recent years, it remains a tempting way to make money for some of the country’s many thousands of unemployed graduates.
The cross-border nature of the crime makes it more difficult for the authorities to tackle, although some Nigerians have also been the victims of sextortion and so-called honeytrap scams.
Sextortion is when a criminal actor coerces a victim to create and send them sexually explicit material. The perpetrator then demands money or more content from their victim under threat to release the material.
According to the FBI, victims tend to be males between the ages of 14 and 17, and the offenders are often located in West African nations, such as Nigeria and the Ivory Coast.
In May, three Nigerian men between the ages of 19 and 22 were charged in the United States over the sextortion of Jordan DeMay, a 17-year-old Michigan resident who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in March of 2022. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
