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Sextortion is where scammers will assume the identity of a young person, approach teenagers in the U.S. on apps like Instagram, have them record explicit videos, then pull the mask away and threaten to release the videos to the victim’s friends and family unless they pay up. Sextortion is common across U.S. social media platforms; at least dozens of young boys have taken their own lives after being targeted.

Erin West and Paul Raffile are scam experts: West is the founder of Operation Shamrock, an organization that aims to disrupt scam operations, and Raffile is a long time cybercrime researcher, who focuses especially on sextortion.  The pair hatched a plan to go to Nigeria to see if they could actually track down a scammer. First, they created fake social media accounts to put a target on their own back. It worked.

Once they landed, they had around six days to find a scammer. It would not be financially viable to sit around in Lagos forever. The pair deployed the IP address grabbing website again, but this time one of the scammers granted the tool more permissions in his browser. The tool was also designed to, if possible, get their exact location, or turn on its camera and see their face. This time, it worked. They had a scammer’s face.

The trip provided rare insight into how some scammers live and how brazenly many of them flaunt their scams. Read now, or watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=973m4leS25c

STORY: https://www.404media.co/how-cyber-sleuths-tracked-a-nigerian-scammer-to-his-doorstep/