30 Jul 2024 - AJ
I’m an old fart - younger than ARPAnet, older than NSFNET. Didn’t hear about the Internet until I was into adulthood. In some ways, I think I was lucky. Scammers were still around, but communication was slower. Someone had to rent a P.O. Box or have a phone number, or physically be present to scam someone. And while child predators certainly did exist when I was growing up, they didn’t have a global reach like they do today.
In researching the incredibly common Pegasus Extortion Scam, I found a set of incredibly interesting - if terrifying - pages from the FBI on extortion aimed at young people. The connection came up because while a lot of the pieces of shit preying on young people use trickery to convince their victims to send their nudes (such as posing as someone around the age as the victim), one terrifying version of the scam uses some of the same tactics as the Pegasus Extortion scam - that is, it convinces a young person that somebody already has nude pictures of them so they need to send more nude pictures - a scam that may come up in a form of instant messaging instead of email as the Pegasus scam does. Which in turn leads the awful piece of shit human being behind this demanding more and more nudes, or even blackmailing the young person for money, depending on their inclination.
Kids, teenagers, and to some extent young adults are very vulnerable to these kinds of things, and the scamming pieces of shit know this. Kids want to be accepted, they want to make friends, they want that human connection - we all do. But developing brains and developing emotional control can interfere with being able to think rationally on top of the emotions that scammers prey upon - fear, shame, greed. Heck, us grown adults fall prey all the time! Scammers don’t care what age you are if they can get something they don’t deserve out of you.
That being said, I won’t be focusing much, if at all, on scams that involve actual victim nudes. My speciality is scams and phishing that allow for financial manipulation (primarily of adults) and account takeovers/identity theft. For me, sexstortion of minors is such an emotional topic that I’d rather leave the education on it to the experts like the FBI.