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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