Tragic results of a cyber blackmail scam

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Baiting Guru Joined: 19 Mar 2007 Posts: 2628

It's not 419scam but result of online conversations. I'm posting in the hope of raising awareness of criminals operating scams on webchats, urging the victim to perform for the camera- then demanding money to withold the explicit footage.
The young man in this story jumped to his death from the Forth Road Bridge in July

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-23712000

Quote:

It appears he had been having online conversations with someone whom he believed to be a girl around his own age.

The day he died he had read a message on his laptop saying images or video would be made public and shared with his friends and family if he didn't pay money into an account.

He was warned that he would be better off dead if he did not transfer the cash.

Less than an hour after replying to the message he had killed himself

Master Baiter Joined: 13 Jun 2012 Posts: 131

Sad loss condolences to the family

Not quite a Newb Joined: 02 Aug 2013 Posts: 59

Imagine that happens to you child.

Baiting Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2011 Posts: 21155

Those people should be hunted down and charged with murder. They are, in effect, the cause of that death.

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 18 Oct 2012 Posts: 611

This is why I fear for my child. He's young, but the computer age will only grow and I really hope I can warn him of this kind of danger. My condolences to the family...I agree, the people who do this are nothing more than murderers.

Posted: Sat Aug 17, 2013 12:25 pm

Nanny Ogg wrote:

It's not 419scam but result of online conversations. didn't pay money into an account.

It's a type of Romance Scam and it seems to be getting more popular amongst the lads.

Expect to see more of it in the near future.

Elite Baiter Joined: 10 Mar 2013 Posts: 1482

Awareness should work relatively well in this case. Not saying that you ever could help everyone specialy since warning a teenager is like telling them to do so. But publicity and reduced payoff should deter them as kids don't usualy have all that much money.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 23 Jul 2012 Posts: 27

next victim wrote:

Those people should be hunted down and charged with murder. They are, in effect, the cause of that death.

People laugh at me when i say drug dealers who cause a deay=th re murderers ,if you cause a death in the commision of a crime ,IMHO Sad

Baiting Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2011 Posts: 21155

IIRC, they were trying to put something like that on the books here in this state. I'm not sure what happened to it. It is a murder charge if someone dies in the commission of a crime or a police chase. Even if the person was hit by a different vehicle.

Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2013 3:33 am

When I was younger and a lot more naive, I was contacted by (I assume) one of these scammers.

"She" randomly added me on MSN one night, back in those ancient days when people still used MSN. It started at as the sort of harmless talk about nothing that MSN was usually used for, and she just seemed a bored girl around my age that somehow got my address (which wasn't unusual - I had at least a few friends who were a bit liberal with giving out others' MSN addresses to friends of theirs, and was forever being added by randoms they knew from various internet forums).

However things pretty quickly became more flirty and... explicit. She often claimed to be sexually frustrated, and always wanted me to turn on my webcam when we chatted. But what she wanted more than anything was for me to show her my cock, which is when I started to smell a rat.

While I was suspicious, a part of me really wanted to believe. At the time I hadn't had much success with the opposite sex and the idea that this attractive girl who was apparently desperate for a root was interested in me was one that was hard to let go of. So I tried to get some sort of proof that she was who she said she was and not, say, someone I knew playing a prank on me or a creep gathering material for his soft-core porn site.

I asked for more photos of her, which she provided (nothing explicit, just random pics that could have been taken from someone's MySpace or Facebook). When I asked her to turn on her webcam, she of course didn't have one. When I asked her to send an explicit photo of herself in exchange for me doing what she wanted, she explained that her phone had recently been stolen. When I suggested that she go to an internet cafe close by (she was apparently on holidays in London and staying at a hotel in the CBD) and use the webcams there, well it was just "too cold" to go outside and she didn't want to have to put clothes on. When I asked how she got my address, apparently "my sister was using my account, she must have added you, I think she got it from address list on some chain email." Looking back, its obvious she was using the exact same evasion tactics that baiters use to get out of providing lads with stuff.

I should point out that whoever was talking to me was able to pull off a very convincing impression of an girl in her late teens. It definitely wasn't a typical lad - whoever the scammer was, they spoke perfect English and were almost certainly from a western country.

Eventually I just got fed up with being constantly messaged by her and badgered about the same things. The more she tried to get me to strip for her on webcam the more I suspected she wasn't who she seemed, but the slim hope that maybe, just maybe, the person really was a hot, sexually-frustrated 19 year old kept me from completely ignoring her (though I did find myself regularly blocking her just so I didn't have to waste long periods of time endlessly explaining why I wasn't going to masturbate on camera to a random stranger). Eventually my MSN account caught a virus that caused it to constantly spam everyone on my contact list, and by this time MSN was starting to fade into obscurity and Facebook was becoming my main way of communicating with friends over the internet, so I just uninstalled it one day and never came back.

So, yes, I can see how this can be a very damaging and effective scam, and had I been more gullible and/or horny I may well have ended up a victim myself.

Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2013 11:37 am

Well, a tactic I quickly learned back in my teenage webchatting days; no free peep shows. If they don't turn their webcam on, I wont turn mine on. This is not negotiable. End of.

Now I'm reaching the age that I'm considering having kids of my own, things like this really get on my mind. Let's face it, we wont be able to stop them from doing these things, I don't want to bring up my kids encased in bubble-wrap in padded cells. I just hope I'm able to teach them the web-sense as well as I can the world-sense to help them keep themselves safe in both the real and virtual worlds...

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 18 Oct 2012 Posts: 611

The problem Basinga is that sometimes these lads in romance scams are able to fake a webcam connection by manipulating a video feed. All they have to do is blur the video feed a bit so that clarity is obscured, and bam...instant "proof" that they are who they say they are.

Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2013 8:51 pm

Gigglesworth wrote:

The problem Basinga is that sometimes these lads in romance scams are able to fake a webcam connection by manipulating a video feed. All they have to do is blur the video feed a bit so that clarity is obscured, and bam...instant "proof" that they are who they say they are.

Easy enough to solve by not having a webcam. They're more trouble than they're worth. Not only can things like this happen, but if you happen to run into the wrong kind of spyware, that little virus can use your own webcam to spy on you. I won't have one in the house because of the risks.

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