Nearly 60 people have been arrested in the Philippines on charges of operating an international "sextortion" network.As the Associated Press reports, Filipino police say the suspects targeted hundreds of people in online chat rooms, luring them into having cybersex and exposing themselves on webcams.Tchikitou filed a lawsuit in the Court of First Instance in Temara Rabat against an unspecified man.
The alleged criminals would secretly record the encounters and then threaten to send the videos to the victims' friends and relatives unless they paid money.
In one case, a victim paid $15,000, though officials say the sums were usually in the range of $500 to $2,000.
Sextortion is blackmail via having cybercrime victims pay money to prevent sexually explicit images and video from being made public.
Like internet scams that rely on social engineering, the sextortion racket also exploits gullible victims."Members of a sextortion crime ring in the Philippines created fake Facebook accounts, which presented them as attractive women to lure men into chatting with them.
According to a report by Trend Micro, sextortion—the use of compromising photos or videos to extract money from victims—is on the rise. Anthony Stancl is currently serving a 15-year prison term for posing as a female on Facebook to lure male students from his high school into sharing sexually compromising photos.
He then blackmailed his victims with the threat of making the photos public to force them to perform sexual acts with him.
Two weeks ago, one of the blackmailers impersonated an attractive girl from Libya nicknamed Ihssane Ben Ahmed on Facebook, and contacted the Parliamentarian Adil Tchikitou.
After several conversations on different topics, they developed the relationship, which came to include Skype chats.
Organized cybercrime groups are using nude photos and explicit videos to blackmail victims in “sextortion” attacks.