In a new documentary for BBC Three, reporter Tir Dhondy investigates the rise of sextortion scams targeting teenage boys on social media and gains unprecedented filming access to a scam centre where various online crimes are perpetrated.
Tir also meets fraudster ‘Temi’, who shows her how AI deep fakes are being used to trick unsuspecting victims. This is the first time this use of AI in sextortion scams has been filmed first-hand.
Blackmailed: The Sextortion Killers is on BBC Three at 9pm and is available on BBC iPlayer now.
Sextortion – sexual extortion – is one of the fastest-growing online crimes. Victims are tricked into sending intimate photos or videos, which the scammers threaten to pass on unless they are paid.
In the UK, the National Crime Agency are now receiving around 110 reports of sextortion each month.
But in the US, things are even worse. The FBI announced that the number of sextortion cases reported to them have more than doubled in the last three years, reaching a high of 55,000 in 2024.
Travelling to Aurora, Missouri, Tir investigates the case of Evan Boettler. In January 2024, Evan was contacted on Snapchat by someone he believed was a girl called JennyTee60.
“Jenny” persuaded him to share explicit images of himself and then threatened to release them if he didn’t pay a sum of money.
“I have your nudes and everything needed to ruin your life”.
This was one of the threats Evan received from the scammer.
Just 90 minutes after receiving the first message, the 16-year-old took his own life.
The IP address associated with the account that blackmailed Evan is traced to multiple locations in Nigeria.
Nigeria has become the leading country for cybercrime in Africa. Those involved in perpetrating online fraud are known locally as “Yahoo Boys”. This label emerged in the early 2000s, when scammers relied on Yahoo! Mail to run elaborate cons. Some have amassed significant fortunes and gained widespread notoriety by showing off their wealth and criminally earned lifestyles on social media.
Scam centres, otherwise known as ‘hustle kingdoms’, have started to appear across Nigeria with organised criminals now running large scale operations, targeting victims on masse.
Nigerian authorities have successfully raided many of these centres, but no journalist has ever filmed inside one. Tir gains unprecedented access to a hustle kingdom in Makoko, a floating settlement in Lagos and one of the poorest areas in the city.
These spaces function like shadow schools where experienced scammers teach newcomers. Boys as young as their early teens are effectively groomed into crime.
‘Ghost’, the leader of this hustle kingdom, says that while the Yahoo Boys under his watch conduct romance scams, as a “God-fearing person” he draws the line at sextortion.
Even amongst Yahoo Boys like Ghost, sextortion is a cause of shame. In part, because of the consequences it can have.
Reports from around the world now indicate that since 2019 there has been a year-on-year increase in suicides related to sextortion, including two boys from the UK in just the last three years.
It’s no surprise given how sophisticated this scam now is. For the first time on camera, Tir films a Yahoo Boy using deepfake technology with a woman he’d hired, acting as the face of the con. He shows an app on his laptop: a professional-grade face-swapping tool that cost him $3,500 – a price he says was worth it for the returns.
In minutes, Rachel’s live performance no longer looked like Rachel, but the face of a white woman from the UK that the Yahoo Boy had stolen and put into the software. This tool was compatible with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, the very platforms used to find victims.
Tir also speaks to a sextortion scammer who goes by the name of ‘Ola’. He has been doing cybercrime since he was 14 and pivoted to sextortion in his late teens.
“I don’t feel bad because I need the money. I don’t care if anyone else is suffering”, he says.
“I grew up in the area with some brothers, they first taught me how to do romance scams, and then we went into blackmailing.”
“We open a social media account using female names from fake name generators. Let me show you, for instance… It’s a site where you get names of people in any country you want.”
“Then you click on generate. The social security number is not complete, but give you a fake phone number, the country code, date of birth, age…”
Ola says the images they use are of porn models. “We go on their social media profile, download their pictures then download their nudes also. Once we get the victim, we confuse them like being friends or dating together. Then we ask them for their nude pictures.”
When asked why he targets young boys, Ola says “Because their sex drive is so high and the young guys are scared of the picture being released to their class groups, their parents or their friends.”
Companies like Snapchat and Meta are increasingly being put under pressure by victims and lawmakers about the growing number of sextortion cases happening on their platforms.
We reached out to Meta to see if they would share additional information relating to Evan Boettlersn case. They declined, citing privacy concerns.
While Meta wouldn’t share additional information relating to the case, they did tell us that the account that blackmailed Evan was flagged as fake by them in January of 2024, the same month that Evan took his own life and the account was subsequently removed. However, they wouldn’t specify when in January the account was detected as fake or whether it was flagged before the account interacted with Evan. We’ll never know if they could’ve stopped it.
A Meta spokesperson said: “We work aggressively to fight it by disrupting networks of scammers and supporting law enforcement.”
A Snapchat spokesperson said: “If we discover this activity through our advanced detection technology or it is reported to us, we take quick action to remove the account and we support law enforcement efforts to help bring offenders to justice.”
Blackmailed: The Sextortion Killers is on BBC Three at 9pm and is available on BBC iPlayer now
