Sextortion' online scam costs B.C. foreign exchange student $1,000

An article by Katie Derosa

A 20-year-old foreign exchange student living on Vancouver Island was scammed out of $1,000 in a “sextortion” case, in which a woman threatened to post naked photos of him online unless he gave her money.

Oak Bay police are investigating and sending out a warning to prevent other sexual extortion cases.

On March 10, the student was talking online to a woman who said she was living in the Philippines. At some point in the video chat, the woman asked the man to disrobe, and recorded the session without him knowing, said Oak Bay police spokesman Const. Rick Anthony.

The woman threatened to post the photos or video on the Internet and Facebook unless he wired money to her.

The man complied and sent $1,000. He has no idea who the woman is, Anthony said.

The student reported the crime to Oak Bay police. Officers told him while they can’t recover the money, he should ignore any future contact from the scammer and report further extortion attempts to police.

“This is a very unfortunate and very unsavoury situation,” Anthony said, saying the victim feels mortified and taken advantage of. “It’s inherently dangerous for people to be going online and making these contacts and providing way too much information or providing way too much of yourself.”

Anthony, a former fraud detective with Victoria police, said these online scams are typically run by international organized crime rings who know local police departments don’t have the budget to chase fraudsters across several countries.

“When you’re talking about this kind of scam ... it’s extremely time-consuming and extremely hard to pin down a single person because it could be a dozen people running this scam,” Anthony said. “Bad guys know that we’re not going to chase them all over the world for a few thousand dollars.”

Cybercrime is the fastest-growing crime trend facing law enforcement agencies across the world, according to Interpol.

Port Coquitlam teen Amanda Todd took her life in October 2012 after years of being tormented online, including being blackmailed by an unknown person who convinced her to expose herself on a webcam and then spread the photos over the Internet.

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What links Kanye and TOWIE with Yahoo webcam spying?

DAZED Article by Jazz Monroe

Earlier this week, Dazed marked the 25th anniversary of the internet by asking whether it’s all gone a bit 1984. At this stage, you suspect we’re way past scaremongering: as government intrusion and corporate web tracking normalise, the reality is not so much on our doorstep as in our lap. Now, to grasp the size of the problem, we face a necessary question. How do we act when somebody is watching?

Essentially, it answers itself: we act. Ordinary people under observation ‘act natural’, which is not the same as ‘being natural’. When someone attractive meets our gaze across the street, we try to sustain that right-foot-left motion which just seconds back was thoughtless and fluid, but no dice. We walk peculiarly erect and trip over heels, feeling somehow naked and alien. Of course there’s nothing frightening about this; it’s just the case that the human gaze has a weird power, the ability to somehow reconfigure our impulses.

Celebrities can act natural, too, but some demonstrate just how drastically the human gaze can destabilise us. Take Kanye West: here is a man completely undressed of social norms. Instead, his prerogative is to fulfil a cultural mythology. Kanye waxes Biblical and rides a sexy motorbike that signifies bravado, wealth and awesomeness. He performs the script of hip-hop prosperity; we know and accept this. His authentic devotion to inauthentic myths is, in a postmodern sense, absolutely central to his performance. It also suggests just how attractive cultural archetypes become when people are watching.

Of course, Kanyefication is hardly an overnight process, but not all cultural archetypes are so flamboyant. In fact, certain mythologies move towards us. With its peculiar aspiration towards both the glamorous and mundane, the natural and contrived, The Only Way is Essex aims not to counter or demystify cultural mythology, but to turn social norms into cultural mythology. Its characters elevate everyday behaviour - sewing, weightlifting, chocolate-eating, arguing, gossiping - to the glitzy realm of 'scripted reality', a kind of post-reality reality. There is an art, TOWIE argues, to regular people being regular. It means the humblebrag is the new brag, mediocrity the new excess. But it's also part of a wider identity crisis, shrinking our ability to differentiate between reality and simulation.

Up to now, the vanishing division between the two has been a problem reserved for sociologists and fiction writers. (See Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Don Delillo’s White Noise.) But TOWIE smooths our transition from being real people to being people of reality. Its characters are not regular people, gifted or lucky enough to get famous, but nor are they actors feigning normality. These are, instead, almost-ordinary folk carefully chosen for their ability to 'act natural'. And they're very good at it. Indeed, watching Lauren Pope idly curl her locks, the viewer is all but erased. Which prompts another question: how much suggested human gaze, whether that of TV viewers or covert government agents, must we shake off to resume natural behaviour? Given our difficulty ignoring glances from hot strangers, you suspect it's pretty much all of it.

“As intrusion goes pandemic, as the internet increasingly hosts our musings and memories, we become perpetually self-aware without even realising"

Two weeks ago, the Guardian published Gen Z’s seminal news story: an Edward Snowden leak that revealed GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, indiscriminately intercepted and stored millions of Yahoo webcam images for counter-terrorism purposes. Many of these images were sexually explicit, and the unsuspecting perpetrators were also unsuspected. Alarming even to post-Patriot Act America, it’s the clearest realisation to date of modern technological paranoia.

The only way to stop webcam hacking is to cover your webcam.  Check out C-SLIDE which manufactures webcam covers for all devices (computers, tablets, ipads, iphones, smart phones, smart tv’s, and more).

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