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And that's when I said, no. I'm not Braden's mom at all. In fact, I'm a former prosecutor. I'm here with a sex extortion expert. We came all the way from The United States to figure out if we could track down people like you.

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist family company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments, and they get early access to our interview series too like this episode. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Also, do remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of our episodes just like this one. Subscribe at youtube.com/@404mediaco. This week, I'm joined by Erin West and Paul Raphael. Erin is the founder of Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit combating scams all over the world coordinating law enforcement with other bodies and experts and all of that sort of thing. Paul is a scam expert.

I've been following for years probably by this point and is absolutely one of the leading voices when it comes to not just the mechanics, but also the impact of sextortion scams. Now, as some of you may know, sextortion is rampant across the world, but also especially The United States as well. This is where scammers, many of them based in Nigeria, will pretend to be young, attractive boys or girls. They will message a young person in their target country. They will trick them into sending over nude images and then they will extort them.

Sometimes this is quote unquote just for a few $100, but that's a lot of money to a child or a teenager who is likely far too embarrassed to go to their friends or go to their family about it. The scammers will then threaten and sometimes carry out and actually do it, sending those images of the new child to their family members or their friends, their Facebook friends, Instagram connections, whatever. Unfortunately, young people are taking their own lives over this. This is a very, very real problem. So what Aaron and Paul did is that they wanted to figure out, can we track down the scammer and then can we go find them in Nigeria?

These are called Yahoo boys. That's the type of scammer in Nigeria. They're called that because they used to use predominantly Yahoo email addresses to do those Nigerian print scams. Right? Now they've moved on to this sort of stuff.

As I've reported, they use some real time video deepfakes and other AI technology as well, such as voice changes. I think this interview is really, really interesting for a bunch of reasons, but they actually went there and they came face to face with these people and came back, I think, with some pretty surprising insights as well. Thank you both so much for this. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. We'll get to everything you saw on your trip.

But how did this plan, this adventure, this dangerous trip, this fact finding mission? How did it come about in the first place, Erin?

I had been following Paul for a long time. I just really admired the work he was doing. And at the same time, I was trying to expose what was happening in Southeast Asia, and that had gotten the attention of a company who was willing to sponsor me to do more trips. And so when I was thinking about where we could go next, I happened to run into Paul. And I was like, Nigeria.

There is a place I would not wanna go by myself, and Paul's an expert. Why not why not suggest it to Paul? And so I pitched it to him. And to my surprise, he was all in from the jump.

Paul, what was your reaction to hearing this plan of let's go to Nigeria and find these scammers?

I think I initially agreed to do this with Aaron because I didn't think it was serious at first. Then but then by lunchtime, Erin said, alright. I've got the funding. I've got the sponsors for the trip. Let's go.

And then it became quite a bit more serious. From then, we kind of wanted to to figure out, okay. What's the plan? What's the storyline? And and kind of what we keyed into was, you know, sextortion is a huge problem.

This scam is dangerous. It's targeting youth. It's surging. I wonder, can we hatch a plan where we put ourselves out there as a target, create our own fake account, get scammed by these criminals, and then trace the criminal back to their home turf? And we did exactly that.

Yeah. I guess and maybe this changed. Maybe this changed when you did get there and you got new information, but at this point when you're hatching this plan, in your head for both of you, what is the goal? Erin, you'd made trips before, so what was the goal with this trip specifically?

I think there were two things for me. One, I was was continuing my my education about transnational organized crime. And I wanted to know, has China set up there into a potentially really explosive combination of Chinese organized crime industrialization married to Nigerian excellence in social engineering and getting people to do things. How bad could that be? That was one thing I was looking at.

But another thing that I think about and talk about all the time is that none of this is that hard and we should be putting a lot more effort into taking this seriously. And so what I wanted to show was, hey, could the two of us go over there, get sex sorted, get blackmailed, and what would it take for the two of us to figure out who was behind it? And that was my interest in showing what could be done with pretty minimal effort.

Paul, I feel like you have developed an expertise in basically getting scammed in a way in order to identify the attackers, obviously. So like, how did the both of you go about setting that up? I mean, it's one thing to have the idea of, well, let's get sex sorted and we'll track down the attackers. That's kind of non trivial. Like, how did you even go about that initially, even from the creation of a, like, for lack of a better word or better way to describe it, like a convincing account, if you know what I mean.

The starting point here was to create the perfect victim, someone who these criminals would target. And we know based on the victim demographics, sextortion scammers are largely targeting young men and teenage boys. So that was step one, figuring out that persona that we wanted to to take on. Then it came to the social media account creation. So we had Instagram account.

We had a Snapchat account at one point, kind of across the gamut, and and we put ourselves out there as bait. At the same time, these criminals are actively discussing, you know, how to target people, where to target people. So using that intelligence, we're able to insert ourselves a little bit higher up on the the the targeting list than maybe the average person would be. So we found basically a way to get blackmailed. Then the question became, now how do we trace or how how do we track who our scammer is?

And that turned out to be much more complicated than we originally thought.

Sure. Let's get to that in a second, but just on the sort of raising yourself through the priority list of targets when you said these people discuss who they want to eventually sextore, what do you mean by that? Is that a telegram group where they're swapping targets or something and you injected yourself into there? Like, what do you mean by that?

Yeah. I think that's kind of right. So the criminals, right, they are actively talking in groups whether it be telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook groups, etcetera. And we know that one of the things they do is they target people who follow certain pages, who interact with certain groups, who may be part of specific sports teams. And, you know, they may be targeting a specific high school or a specific sports team today, and then next week, they're targeting a completely different one.

So the identity we created, they were athletic into sports, but also a gamer, so they liked a bunch of those games and things like that. And using that method, we were able to create our own convincing profile that got targeted.

So you set up the account and you do get targeted. How quickly does that happen and what does that look like in practice? Like they send you a DM or

Yeah. I think it was only a couple days until we started receiving some suspicious direct messages. But over the span of a week or two, we had received at least 10 suspicious messages, from accounts that we believe are sextortion scammers. During the whole process, I think we got sextorted three or four times by different criminals. And so kind of as we are even in Nigeria and and the week before, we don't even know which criminal we're going to end up actually finding.

It's it's kind of a mystery up until the very end.

I could not believe how quickly, how relatively quickly these people were reaching out. And it just really was eye opening of what what a target a young boy who plays sports and appears to be a totally normal kid, what kind of attention they got and how quickly they got it. And it just seemed so much more prolific than I expected.

Yeah. So these accounts reaching out that you were taken aback by how many there were, what were they purporting to be like young girls of a similar age of the boy you've created? Or like what was sort of the demographic that the scammers were trying to emulate?

Sure. These scammers were were impersonating young attractive females. We found out later on that a lot of the profile pictures that they had stolen were actually coming from OnlyFans models or other adult film stars. But yeah. So the scammers, they they appear to be attractive young women, and the conversation starts out normal.

They would slide into our DMs and just say, hey. How's it going? I saw you in my, friend's suggestions list. I hope that's not rude that I sent you a message. It starts out normal, but then it very quickly turns flirtatious.

They ask, like, where do we live? Can I see a selfie? What do you look like right now? And as that conversation goes on, that's when it starts to take a sexual turn before the blackmail begins.

So you're getting these messages, you continue to engage with these people, you haven't left for Nigeria yet, what's the next stage? Do you need to choose one to focus on? Do you already have an idea? Like what's the next step in this conversation that you're having with them?

You know, after these conversations go on for a bit, the scammer will typically send a provocative photo and request that we send one of ourselves. And when that happens, that's when they flip the script and the black belt begins. They say, hey. I'm gonna ruin your life unless you pay me $500 right now. I'm gonna get you kicked off your rear sports team expelled from school.

I'm gonna shame you in front of your parents. I'm gonna make these images go viral. And the criminals have, you know, screenshotted our profile, our friends, you know, all of these things and really ruthless terrible threats, especially thinking, you know, potentially a teenager going through that experience. So, yeah, we had a great partner in this fight, Kit Boga. You may know him from YouTube.

And, yeah, he has this tool that we were able to access that basically appeared to be a Bitcoin Redeem website. So when these criminals were demanding money from us, we would say, okay. But I can only pay you in Bitcoin. Here's the website. Here's the code to redeem it.

And on that website, we were able to see their IP address, where they came from. But then that website also asked them, do you allow your browser to get your exact location? Do you allow your browser or do you allow this website to see your face? Turn the camera on. All these sorts of permissions that we asked for.

Now before the trip, our scammers were smart. Right? All we saw was their IP address. So we know that they were located in or around Lagos, Nigeria. But we hadn't seen their face and we hadn't gotten their exact location yet.

But we still decided to embark on the trip to Nigeria because we thought we could still track them down.

That is a very, very interesting tool to use against these people specifically. I mean, you're essentially social you're social engineering them for good, basically. So you have that information. You have like, okay, there's an IP address. They're in Nigeria.

I guess we'll go. We'll figure out there. Erin, when you both arrive, what's the first item on the agenda when you float all the way to Nigeria and now you have to figure out what to do? Like, what do you literally do when you first get there?

I came a couple of days. Well, came actually like thirty six hours before Paul and met with some law enforcement contacts. But from the jump when Paul hit the ground, we were very much on a time clock. We were very much, we've got six days to get this done. Where are we?

Who's talking to us? Do we know about anyone who's talking to us? The entire time we were on the ground, we were mission driven in trying to accomplish this task while at the same time really taking advantage of some amazing opportunities that we also had to see other parts of of the scam and meet Yahoo boys. But we were very much trying to figure out, is this gonna be possible? We were well aware of the time ticking away the entire time we were on the ground of, are we gonna be able to actually figure this out and make contact with a scammer?

Yeah. And that time limit is mostly purely for logistical budget reasons, I imagine. Like you can't afford to go to Nigeria indefinitely to figure out who these people are. So you do that, then Paul, how do you go about figuring that out? You mentioned that tool, sort of do you deploy that same tool again and then you do get the location?

Like, how do you go a step further to actually figure that out?

Yeah. We we kept trying. And at one point while on the ground, we actually were able to convince one of the scammers to accept and approve the face scan for security purposes on this Bitcoin Redeem website. So we have their face. Again, that's, you know, great intelligence, but it still feels so far away from us actually getting to our answer.

There's millions of people in in Lagos alone. But there was one piece of critical evidence. And, one of these scammers, they tried to deep platform us. They brought us from Instagram where they initially targeted us over to WhatsApp. So we had a phone number.

And interestingly, the phone number started with a country code 234. That's the country code for Nigeria. So given that, we know that we have an a legitimate local phone number and that ended up being a pivotal piece of evidence. Our fixer, Priya, threw that phone number in his phone for Truecaller to see kind of, alright, is this phone number saved with with a certain name or something? And the name that he saw on it was Big Dollar.

So we have a potential suspect name. Additionally, Erin had some contacts who ran additional searches on that phone number. Erin, I'll I'll let you take that part.

Yeah. At that point, we were pulling every thread we could. So one of the interesting pieces of this was we had that picture of the guy in his room and we were pulling pieces of what's on the walls in that room. What is that poster? We were throwing that into Google Lens and trying to figure out.

We figured out what the poster was on his wall and it turned out to be a very popular Nigerian rapper. And so that was just some interesting flavor. But where we really were able to make headway is after we had the Truecaller number and we were able to provide that to some of our contacts at home. I work with Professor Gary Warner from University of Alabama and he was able to take that piece of information and give us back other pieces of information. And ultimately he was able to give us the true name of the scammer.

So now we've got the scammer's name. Next stop, social media. And then we started using our colleagues back home who do a lot of work in social media and OSINT, and they put that to work. And we were able to find other social media profiles that we hadn't found initially. And as we were doing all of this, we kept getting confused because we had our one guy with the face and the Nigerian musician.

And then we had this other one where we didn't have a face, but we were able to figure out social media and phone numbers. And we were having trouble keeping track of both of them. And Paul said, I wish we had a whiteboard. And then Paul's like, we do have a whiteboard. He pulls out a dry erase marker, and we map this thing out on the mirror in Paul's room trying to keep separate who each of these players are so that we could keep them straight.

It is funny how we we can all access stuff like Maltigo and other various OSINT tools and that sort of thing. At the end of the day, you just need a whiteboard or in this case, So just write stuff down. I'm absolutely the same way when I'm trying to especially find the identity of somebody online and doing OSINT and that sort of thing. So you do that, you're mapping that out, you're getting closer. Paul, at this point, are you confident you have an identity?

Like how do you overcome that confusion sort the fog of war once you start mapping out? Do you land on an identity and some more information?

Yeah. So essentially in the past the last twenty four hours is when this whole case comes together. And I think that's maybe a little bit of our desperation, like just searching for answers and and needing to find something. So when we get kind of some of the results back on the open source searches and tools, I always take those with a grain of salt because there's all sorts of errors that can happen in in that data. But the thing that really convinced me is when we got that TikTok account back, we looked through the TikTok account.

It looks normal. It looks specific to the region. But then I start flipping through some of the the recent posts. And on one of the carousels, I see, oh, six days ago, this person has uploaded a photo carousel, and it has blackmailing messages, like the same messages we were getting, threatening messages, threatening to leak news, and, you know, make you go viral unless this person pays and even showed the name of the contact at the top of the chat was Jaden in this case, so likely another victim. That to me was I think very convincing.

And and there's a part that comes a little bit later on when we actually get to confront our scammer where that social media profile then goes dark. It goes private. The username changes. All of these things change once the criminal knows we're onto him. And that to me is is clear and convincing evidence.

We have the right guy. We know who he is.

Yeah. In the videos that you both have posted, you are traveling around with armed security. Right? I think there's one way or a couple where you're in a jeep and there's someone with like an AK 47 style assault rifle, that sort of thing in the passenger seat. Did you have security essentially for the entire trip?

And I know this is somewhat of a stupid question. I feel like it's obvious, but why the need for that security?

So I won't comment on when we did or didn't have security, but what I will say is that on that particular day when we were going outside the city of Lagos to a two and a half hour away remote location, it wouldn't be wise for two white people with cameras to show up unprotected in that location. It's unspoken, but certainly we all know that there are dangers in going to Nigeria. There are people who are kidnapped. It is a legitimate problem that people are kidnapped and held for ransom. We spoke before we went, we spoke with a number of sources about how do we keep ourselves safe?

Is this smart? Is this doable? How would we do it? And so we really took security seriously. And I think there were points for both of us when we were contemplating this of, does this make sense for us?

Is this too over the line? Are we really pushing too far this time? Or is this something that can be done with appropriate security? And I think for me, and I don't want to speak for Paul, but we really felt like we were in the hands of a fixer fixer who had done this more than once, who had been responsible for people in that country and who had provided them with adequate security. And that certainly made me feel a lot more comfortable about doing what we did.

Yeah. How did you feel about it, Paul, about the security and the going to certain locations?

Yeah. I I think maybe three out of the six days on the ground, I probably had an internal thought saying, oh, is this safe? This can't be safe. There's no way this is safe. But then, right, relying on our fixer, relying on our local teams, I trusted them.

So we made it out in one piece.

So you have the identity, and now it's time to find them and go confront them. How exactly do you do that? Do you send a message and say, hey, we've identified you, we would love to meet you. Like how do you actually approach that first of all?

When we were going out there, we had been provided GPS coordinates as to where this person could be located by day and by night. And so we were going to those coordinates to see what we could see when we got there. So when we got to the first location, our fixer got out and started walking around to the building that we thought was the home of our scammer and immediately were obvious. We're obvious. We're on dirt roads with a big car, with a man in the front with a machine gun.

And I'll tell you what, local people were not I mean, we were obvious and we drew attention from the jump. And I have a great picture of this woman just standing there like this looking at us like, what what gives? What are you doing here? And then behind her was a man like on his cell phone. And we're, you know, we're talking about a village where everybody knows everybody.

We stood out and the location we thought we'd find him was empty. And so I'll I'll pass it to Paul to talk about what our fixer did next.

Yeah. Our fixer gets on the phone and calls our suspect. Our fixer pretends to be a friend, maybe whose phone number is is not saved in the phone. He says, hey. I'm I'm at your house.

You know, I wanna come meet with you. That's really generally just trying to set up a meet. And we it starts to work. You know, the the first conversation I think goes well. Then the criminal calls back asking, oh, who are you?

What's your name? Do I actually know you? So his suspicion has been raised now at this point. Eventually, right, the the criminal does not immediately agree to meet with us. He is very resistant to this idea.

He doesn't know what's going on. Now we've already kind of created a bit of a commotion and a stir in the town as as Aaron mentioned. At the same time now, we also start to contact people who might know this scammer, people close to him, people from his social media, people from his contacts, for example. And we asked them, hey. You know, we're here.

We wanna meet. Damilare is the first name of the suspect or Big Dollar. Can you let us know where is Big Dollar? We wanna talk with him. And after a couple calls down the list, Big Dollar calls us back.

A little bit of time has passed. Big Dollar is essentially, like, begging to hear from us, like, okay. Why are you calling my friends? Why are you in my town? What's going on?

Like, he he's kind of begging now to to know what's happening. And then that's when we hand the phone to Erin. And and she just does the most badass thing that I've ever seen.

But what was that?

I just confronted him. I started off with wanting to see what he would tell me. So I pretended that I was Braden's mom and that, hey, I know you blackmailed my son. And he starts in with, oh no, no, my phone was stolen. I don't know anything about what you're talking about.

And I am rebuffing that and saying, but you do. You know what this is. And he says that, but he's willing to help me. He's willing to help me figure out who did this to my son. And in his mind, he's getting off the phone with us under the guise of I'm gonna go help you.

I needed some time to do that. And that's when I said, no, I'm not Braden's mom at all. In fact, I'm a former prosecutor. I'm here with a sextortion expert. We came all the way from The United States to figure out if we could track down people like you.

And we have. And then he kept trying to deny and argue. And then I just got more stern with him and told him, we look. We know exactly who you are. We know where you live.

We've seen your social media. We've seen the evidence that you've independently put out there, and our next step is the police. And we're gonna give this to the FBI, and and you're gonna stop doing what you're doing. And, you know, Paul was watching in real time as social media was getting privatized and and, names in social media were changing. And, clearly there was an impact.

I don't know that these people are being confronted in this way and certainly not by people who they know have been in their village this afternoon. I think it was an interesting opportunity to really put some fear in a class of people who aren't really afraid of being arrested.

Yeah. Because it's so so rare for them. It's so so rare for them to be arrested, although, you know, it does happen in some cases, but it is pretty rare. And it's even rarer for two people to turn up to their town and be like, yes, we have our masks here and we're going to keep talking to you. Does he agree to meet you or what happens?

He's just like, no, I'm done. Right?

Essentially, think we were all done after that call. But we're armed with every piece of evidence about this guy. We know all kinds of information about him and he's exposed. And so I hope that he continues in fear.

So, Paul, what happens next after that sort of phone call? Because we're getting right to the end of the the trip here. As you say, there was the time was really counting down. So what happens next after that?

Yeah. There there were, I think, two big endeavors within our trip that that we also tackled along the way trying to find our scammer. The first was interviewing nine other sextortion scammers and being able you know, they were much more forthcoming. From those conversations, we were able to glean information about their tactics, how they target people, the apps that they use, the AI tools that they use. We also learned about the economy, the the jobs that support the whole scam.

Right? There are jobs for people who sell the fake accounts, people who have the Cash App and the Bitcoin and all the other payment systems. So there's a whole economy supporting the scam economy behind it. And then secondly was a ritual that we happen to see called a Yahoo Plus ritual. And, you know, the this is I I think one of the craziest experiences of the trip and also of my life.

We get out of the van, you know, we're probably forty five minutes outside the city of Lagos. And Aaron and I are led down this very muddy hill into basically a a field, a muddy field that had rained the last few days with all these dilapidated houses that were up on stilts and made with corrugated steel and cardboard, you know, just a very impoverished area. And we were led across this, you know, walkway, not even a walkway. It it it was mud, you know, tires that we had balance over, bamboo sticks that we had to balance over, which was not working by the way. I just kept falling into the mud.

And so we arrive at this hut essentially up on stilts. It's about six feet high. We have to climb up the the ladder, and it's introduced to us as the Babalau's hut. And so we naturally ask, what is a Babalau? And we learn a Babalau is a ritualist, a spiritual leader who can cast spells, juju, voodoo, black magic.

These are all the terms that the locals had used for it. So we had a scammer there with us, and he brought a picture of the victim that he's trying to manipulate as well as his identity that he has impersonated. And the Baa Lao performed the whole ritual to merge and fuse those two souls together in order to bring more fortune to our scammer. Erin, if you wanna go into detail, feel free.

So what was fascinating about it is the fact that we even got to have eyes on this. The idea that we were able to walk through a quarter of a mile of people calling out at us and get into this room and witness a ritual that is held closely in Nigerian culture. For the most part, people believe that this is real. And I would say half of them engage in it and half of them are too scared of it that they don't come near it. So as we are approaching and walking up these rickety stairs to get into the Babalau's lair where this happens, we're hearing live animals and he's grabbing this like rice bag full of a goose and a live chicken.

And there were so many parts of what we saw and it went on for two and a half hours that there was grinding of herbs. There was creating of talisman. There were binding together of talisman. They were bringing out the photographs of the victim and the profile that was being used to scam. There was the removal.

There was the animal sacrifice and humanity gathering outside the Babaloo's hut frustrated that what are these people doing here? They don't belong here. Why are they here? And that was a little scary as well.

Obviously, scammers and families of scammers all around the world are gonna have different spiritual, religious, atheist beliefs, whatever. I don't think I've ever heard of a scammer using or attempting to use spirituality in their scam essentially to be like, please, could you make my scam better by merging these two souls together? I don't think I've ever heard of that. Erin, did you get any idea how common that was? Like was this particular scammer an outlier or is that quite a regular thing?

Well, that's what I wondered as well. And and because it was so different to us, I assumed that not that many people engaged in this, but that's not true at all. A lot of people look to have a spell cast over the scam. This is definitely something that people do. And I'll tell you, we were there for two and a half hours.

And as we were trying to leave, the scammer wanted to do yet another ritual, yet one more thing that would make the spell be cast over his situation.

Maybe I'm misreading this, and I'd like to ask you, Paul, just on the fact that this scammer and others are going to a spiritual leader and they are asking for what accounts to a blessing on their scam, to me that indicates that obviously the scammer does not feel bad about it, obviously. And also there's that it is socially acceptable, if not encouraged, to participate in some of these scams and to be a scammer. Do think I'm misreading that there or was that the implication you got as well that, yeah, sure, we're happy that you're scamming these young boys halfway across the world?

I I think it's totally socially understood. Like you mentioned, everybody kind of knows that's happening. Whether or not it's accepted, right, we heard some folks who are are religious people and they were not at all okay with using this this magic. They called it dark magic or voodoo or juju. So like Aaron said, right, about half the population seems to believe in it and be okay with it and potentially even use it.

Whereas the other half, you know, says, no, that's occult magic. That's occult. We are not getting near that.

So you come away from this trip, which I mean to me sounds insanely successful, you know, in all of these different ways and you Paul, you mentioned the AI tools you learned about and then you see the sort of social aspects there and just you prove that you can track these people down. But I'll just ask each of you one by one. Like Erin, what was sort of the main thing you came away with on that trip having learned that you definitely didn't have when you were first setting out there?

I left knowing that if two people without badges, without guns could show up in such a foreign environment and be able to make this kind of headway, I can only imagine what would happen if people were putting effort into this using the tools at the disposal of law enforcement to take this on, things could be done at scale. And what we heard specifically from the Yahoo boys themselves during these interviews, is that that's what they believe. They believe that more arrests would make a difference. Now I'll let Paul comment on that because that's something that was really significant to both of us.

Yeah. I think that was the biggest thing that surprised me was the fact that these criminals said, in response to our question, how can we reduce this crime? The resounding answer was more arrests. They don't know anybody who's been arrested for doing this sort of crime. And as part of that, there's no deterrence.

So they think they can keep getting away with it. And the fact that as Erin mentioned, the two of us in the span of a week can prepare to go to Nigeria and, you know, track down our scammer and nine others, you know, so so can any law enforcement agency. So that's a challenge. Let's do it.

So that's why I wanted to ask about the trip. And then the main other thing I just wanted to ask about before we wrap up is that there's another component here, like another series of entities, and that is of course The US platforms, There's Meta with Instagram, with WhatsApp, potentially iMessage, Apple as well, although I think it seems like predominantly is or a lot of it is happening on Meta platforms, right? Paul, what do you think about the responsibility of those platforms when it comes to either policing this act sort of activity or assisting law enforcement or providing features that could, you know, mitigate the sort of issue? Like what do you think The US platform's responsibility is here?

Yeah. We ask these criminals what platforms enable you to commit the most crimes. And the first three answers that that we heard across the board, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, They're all on Vimeta. In a honorary mention fourth place, we heard TikTok quite a lot as well. So from the social platforms, they can do so much to prevent this.

We're seeing these criminals use the same profile pictures, the same catfish identity, the same scripted messages, the same behavior of adding a whole bunch of teenagers and then sending them the same messages. This is a scaled abuse, and scaled abuse is detectable. And if it's detectable, it's preventable. So, the onus is on them to do something about this.

Yeah. Erin, what do you think about that about US platforms responsibility?

I've said it for a long time with the pig butchering scandal. But what I will also say is there is no question that American businesses could do a lot to keep teenagers more safe. And and the fact is the gravity of what's happening mandates that they need to do this. We have boys killing themselves over interactions that are happening exclusively on Meta platforms. And just like Paul said, there are so many indicators that could be tracked and easily identified that it's reprehensible that they are not putting the time, effort, resources into keeping kids safer.

Not to mention the number of adults that are also victims of this crime.

Yeah. I mean, you will read national media reports or local media reports, or you'll just see stuff on Facebook as well. Or, you know, I just sometimes scroll through the sextortion subreddit, and just every single day, if not every single hour, it is some kids saying, hey, I'm getting sextorted now, what the hell do I do? And they're clearly freaking out, and they're clearly really, really not having a good time. I can't imagine being in that situation as a young person.

Well, I was just gonna say that something interesting happened while we were there. Did get a Paul got a reach out from someone who was who was in the middle of a sex abortion. It was a it was a mom who wanted to protect her son. And we had a call with them and and Paul walked them through things that could be done in real time to make themselves more safe. And we need more of that.

We need more availability of of that type of resource for people who are freaking out and don't know what to do.

Paul, do you just wanna speak to that briefly? Like as almost a PSA, like what should somebody do if they are being sex tortured as a young person or if or if they're the parent of a child that's being sex tortured? Like, what should these people do ideally?

Yeah. So if someone is blackmailing you over nude images, stop the communication, block them, report them to the platform, and report them to authorities. I c three dot gov for the FBI here in The US. Don't send money. Don't send more photos.

You know, this is only going to encourage the criminal to to demand more things from you. Private all your social media accounts, including, in some cases, changing your username, changing your display name, and changing your profile picture. That way the criminal can't search you from a different account that they haven't been blocked on. And talk to someone about it. Right?

So many people are going through this and the world is not over. You you can recover and get through this.

I think that's very good advice. This conversation and your trip was really, really fascinating. And thank you both for coming on. I really, really, really do appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having us. I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

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