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00:00:01
Sextortion: The Evil Scam Targeting our Teens in Their Bedrooms, A Conversation with Paul Raffile, Senior Intelligence Analyst
572 Plays5 months ago
In this crucial episode of Scam Rangers, we explore the dark and disturbing world of Sextortion. This crime occurs when online predators trick individuals, often teens, into sharing nude images or videos and then use these compromising materials to extort money, more images, or other demands. These predators threaten to share the images with the victim's friends and family if they don't comply. Our guest, Paul Raffile, a Senior Intelligence Analyst with a career dedicated to investigating online crimes and financial scams, joins us to shed light on this pressing issue.
Key Discussion Points:
Paul explains how sextortion scams unfold, the social media platforms commonly used by predators, and the emotional impact on victims, particularly teens. He shares advice for social media companies on preventing these scams, drawing on strategies from financial institutions that detect account takeovers. We also explore how money is transferred to criminals and the risk signals financial institutions can monitor to spot suspicious activities.
Resources:
Follow Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/sextortion-yahoo-boys-snapchat-tiktok-teen-wizz-rcna134200
NCRI Report: https://networkcontagion.us/reports/yahoo-boys/
New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/nyregion/social-media-scam-sextortion.html
Article on WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/yahoo-boys-scammers-facebook-telegram-tiktok-youtube/
Training materials on NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/sextortion-yahoo-boys-snapchat-tiktok-teen-wizz-rcna134200
This podcast is hosted by Ayelet Biger-Levin who spent the last 15 years building technology to help financial institutions authenticate their customers and identify fraud. She believes that when it comes to scams, the story starts well before the transaction. She has created this podcast to talk about the human side of scams, and to learn from people who have decided to dedicate their lives to speaking up on behalf of scam victims and who take action to solve this problem.
Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn and reach out to learn about her additional activities in this space.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayelet-biger-levin/
ScamRanger: https://scamranger.ai/
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Transcript
Introduction to Sextortion Scams
00:00:00
Speaker
They then take these videos and then send them to these teenagers pretending to be the girl or woman in the photos. And the moment that the teen reciprocates and sends something back under the coercion of that criminal, that's when the blackmail begins. Hey, I have your nudes and everything needed to ruin your life. I've screenshotted all your friends, your followers.
00:00:23
Speaker
and I'm gonna send this out to them one by one, unless you pay me $300, $1,000. And then the scare tactics just kind of get worse and worse from there.
00:00:37
Speaker
Extortion is a crime that happens when an online predator, typically an adult pretending to be a teenager, tricks someone into giving them nude images or videos, and then demands money, more images, or makes other demands, threatening to share the images with the victim's friends and family if they don't comply.
Interview with Paul Raphael: Fighting Sextortion
00:01:01
Speaker
Scam Rangers.
00:01:03
Speaker
a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us. I'm your host, Ayere Figuero Levine, and I'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this problem.
00:01:19
Speaker
Today's scam ranger is on a mission to fight extortion. Paul Raphael is a senior intelligence analyst who published a report with NCRI called a digital pandemic uncovering the role of the yao boys in the search of social media enabled financials extortion targeting minors.
00:01:38
Speaker
In my conversation with Paul, we talk about how the scam happens. We also talk about the tragic impact of these scams on teens and provide some advice for social media companies on how they can do more to proactively prevent these scams, as well as how financial institutions can observe risk signals in order to identify and combat these scams. Hi, Paul. It's so great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me.
00:02:07
Speaker
Well, so I wanted to start by having you share a little bit about your background as it pertains to cybercrime investigation and fraud investigation. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to deal with this. So I worked as a cyber threat intelligence analyst for the past 10 years, protecting companies from fraudulent threat actors, cyber threat actors, and other groups who want to cause harm.
00:02:35
Speaker
So you focus more on enterprise or financial institutions? A little bit of both. So I've been in the private sector for most of my career, but I actually started out on a government contract for the Office of Director of National Intelligence tracking ISIS in the Middle East back in 2015. From there, then I moved over to corporate and have been fighting fraud, fighting cyber threat actors and other criminals along the way.
00:03:04
Speaker
So you're really an investigator looking for their MOs, their TTPs. How did you get into investigating sextortion?
Evolution and Methods of Yahoo Boys
00:03:14
Speaker
So about a year ago, one of my friends was a victim of financial sextortion. And he came to me, he knows me kind of as like that online investigations guy. And he asked, what do I do in this situation? So I told him what I thought he should do. But then I started to look online, what are the other recommended sources?
00:03:35
Speaker
telling people to do. And at that time I found just an explosion of communities, of people saying that the same thing was happening to them, using the same scripts, using the same methods and tactics, and it all seemed very coordinated, almost like organized crime. Once we started to pull the thread here, we saw that a lot of this activity was linking back to Nigeria.
00:03:59
Speaker
And that's when some red flags started to go off because I had previously faced off against Nigeria-based financially motivated cyber threat actors in the past.
00:04:10
Speaker
Um, they call themselves the Yahoo boys. And when I was working for financial institutions, um, you know, they were of course targeting, uh, those accounts for account takeovers, similar to how they're doing now on social media. Um, and yeah, we had faced off against them previously. So I'm no stranger to the Yahoo boys. So tell me more about them. What I understand that they execute a number of.
00:04:36
Speaker
types of scams you started talked about account takeover i know they're definitely involved in romance scams the old nigerian prince scams lottery scams different they have many many playbooks right absolutely the yahoo boys go back about two decades to those nigerian prince emails
00:04:54
Speaker
They're named after the free Yahoo.com email addresses that they used to generate. Since then, like you mentioned, they've evolved from romance scams to crypto scams to impersonation scams. And now this scam, financial sextortion, which is making them a whole lot of money very, very quickly and causing a whole lot of devastation with victims along the way.
Impact of Sextortion on Teens
00:05:18
Speaker
This crime really started for them about 18 months ago, more or less.
00:05:22
Speaker
And it essentially started to spike overnight. We hear stories from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in their tip line, starting to receive these reports at such a rapid pace that they were overwhelmed. And it was a completely different MO than they had been used to. I wanted to ask about the trend of, in terms of the pervasiveness of this scam. First of all, I think we've known
00:05:50
Speaker
financial sexual extortion, uh, to be around for a while now. But we also know that it's targeting teens more and more, and they're probably more susceptible to these scams because of their development, the hormones, the, you know, the, the social fear or the desire to be socially, you know, acceptable and, and this, and the fear of, of their information being leaked.
00:06:16
Speaker
What do you think changed in the targeting of Yau boys as an example? And we'll talk about other groups soon. What do you think has changed and has made this scam so pervasive? And I know you have a few numbers and stats about the provenativeness and how the scam has grown.
00:06:38
Speaker
Absolutely. So you're right, financial sex torsion itself is not really new. But what is so urgent and what is kind of, you know, ringing the alarm bells for everybody right now is that it's increasingly targeting minors. And over those last 18 months, it has grown by about 18,000%. And what I mean by that is back in 2021, there were only 139 reported cases of financial sex torsion targeting minors.
00:07:04
Speaker
Fast forward to 2023, there were over 26,000 reported cases of that crime. And you're talking about the US when you say that. Just victims within the US, yes. So one of the very hard aspects of sextortion is the impact on teens. And unfortunately, there have been many known cases of suicide. What do we know about that? What are the numbers now?
00:07:32
Speaker
At this point, within the past two years or so, there's been about 31 confirmed teen suicides as a result of sextortion, ranging from age 12 to 17. And it's getting to a point where the regularity, it's every week or every couple of weeks we're hearing about another case. And those are the cases that are reported, that we know the connection, that we know the reason, that they left some breadcrumbs for their families and for
00:08:01
Speaker
law enforcement to understand what happened. What we don't know is those cases that are not reported. And we know that even from the stats that you mentioned from reported cases that did not result in suicide, we know that in common scams, the estimate is that less than 10% actually report the scams. I wouldn't be surprised if for these types of scams, the numbers were even much, much lower because of the isolation, because of what they do.
00:08:32
Speaker
Right. This is, you know, they rely on fear, embarrassment. The Australian federal police estimates that less than 10% of victims actually report financial extortion. I agree with you. I would not be surprised if that number was much, much, much lower. And extrapolating that to the suicides that have occurred, you know, these kids are dying because they don't want anybody to ever know what happened.
00:08:57
Speaker
Um, and I wouldn't be surprised, you know, if there are so many cases out there where it's just a mystery that phone is locked and the parents might just never know what happened. So we'll talk about prevention and what we can do about it.
How Sextortion Scams Operate
00:09:12
Speaker
Of course, that's a very important topic to cover. Um, but I wanted to, to dive a little bit more into the anatomy of an attack, if we can kind of.
00:09:23
Speaker
really go step by step. What happens in the case of a sextortion scam? So most of the sextortion attacks that are targeting minors are happening on Instagram and Snapchat. They're receiving a friend request, usually from a young, attractive female. And they're primarily targeting boys in these cases. Over 90% of the victims in financial sextortion are males.
00:09:52
Speaker
So they're impersonating young females. Generally, they get added on Instagram. The moment that the teen accepts that follow request on Instagram, their entire friends and following list is exposed to that criminal.
00:10:07
Speaker
Unlike Facebook, where you can actually keep your connections and friends private, fully private, on Instagram, the moment you accept someone's file request, they see your entire friends list. And that is what becomes that leverage that is used in most financial sex torsion incidents.
00:10:24
Speaker
From there, the conversation generally flows over to Snapchat, where the sextortion account asks, or coerces the victim into sending a compromising photo.
00:10:37
Speaker
The sex torsion account is generally sending photos first and using Snapchat's features like a live photo or live video indicator to suggest that they're speaking to a real person right now. But they're not. They're not, no. They're putting video and using that indicator to try and convince the victim that they're in a live video, but they're actually manipulating those indicators.
00:11:02
Speaker
Exactly. So of course they're just using pre-recorded videos of models, usually stolen from OnlyFans. They then take these videos and then send them to these teenagers pretending to be the girl or woman in the photos.
00:11:19
Speaker
And the moment that the teen reciprocates and sends something back under the coercion of that criminal, that's when the blackmail begins. Hey, I have your nudes and everything needed to ruin your life. I've screenshotted all your friends, your followers, and I'm going to send this out to them one by one, unless you pay me $300, $1,000. And then the scare tactics just kind of get worse and worse from there.
00:11:46
Speaker
So I just watched Maria Van Zeller's documentary. She has a series called Trafficked and there's an episode about sextortion. And she interviews someone there who did occasionally a few sextortion cases, not to teens, it was to older men and stopped. But she actually told her about this organized crime type activity where there are people called chatters who
00:12:13
Speaker
initiate the conversation, do the enticement, do the luring, do that whole before the new descent from the teen, from the victim. And then once the new descent, there's an automatic switch into blackmail mode, and that is executed by potentially someone else who has that role of really threatening the victims, right?
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's really scary the way that they've been able to scale this crime through kind of those organized methods. What are we talking here about in terms of, do we know the numbers of criminals who are involved in these scam operations and these organized crime type activities in Nigeria?
00:12:57
Speaker
We don't know the exact number. There are tens of thousands, potentially even hundreds of thousands of people who consider themselves Yahoo boys, who are, you know, those Nigerian scammers doing internet scams. We don't know the exact number who are participating in this extortion scam.
00:13:15
Speaker
But what we do know is we've found dozens and dozens of videos, scripts, how-to guides that these Yahoo boys have been sharing with them their social media circles on TikTok, on YouTube, wide out in the open. And those have been getting tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of views.
00:13:34
Speaker
And we think that is part of the reason why this scam has gone rampant over these past 18 months is around that time is when they started to share these scripts, share these methods.
Global Spread of Sextortion
00:13:46
Speaker
And they call them like basically how to guys how to commit sextortion and get a lot of money by doing it.
00:13:53
Speaker
I just saw an article this morning about use of deepfakes. We know it's been around for a while, the possibility, we've been talking as an industry about the possibility of using deepfakes in romance scams. And even I saw maybe a year ago, a video of someone showing how that would work. But today in the article, this is a real scam happening in real time that one of the Yahoo boys potentially, I think it was one of the Yahoo boys, but it's definitely someone from Nigeria, is filming.
00:14:22
Speaker
showing them scamming someone using deep fakes in real time. And you can see the person in the video who's talking has a completely different skin color and appearance from the person they're pretending to be. So now it's not just recorded videos potentially not being online. You can actually do it in real time and appear as someone else. So that's pretty scary as well.
00:14:48
Speaker
It is. Yeah. Wired just had an excellent article about the real-time deepfakes used for romance scams. I think that's the one. Yep. And yeah, they are way ahead of us with the technology. You know, we don't have the tools to fight back against that yet. In the documentary, Mariana Van Zeller talks about scam groups in the Philippines as well. So it's not just Nigeria, unfortunately. And maybe they learned from those
00:15:16
Speaker
how to guides from the Yahoo boys. I don't know how it started in particular in the Philippines. I don't think we got to the bottom of that, but it seems like there's one person who kind of.
00:15:26
Speaker
took it and spread it to the level of crime organization in the Philippines as well. And we've seen the same with pig butchering scams and how they're now not just in Southeast Asia, but they're happening in other places, Latin America, as well as Africa. So it definitely seems like the criminals are learning from each other, sharing on social media.
00:15:54
Speaker
You know, it makes me wonder, one of the things that I saw on that show is how they speak about, about their morality and how, if they feel bad for the consequences of their actions. And I think this scam beyond any other has all of them have an emotional impact beyond the financial impact.
00:16:15
Speaker
all of them. And this is why, you know, I started Scam Rangers in the first place is because it's not just the financial impact, it's the emotional impact that we really need to think about. But here the emotional impact leads to detrimental consequences, suicides more than any other type of scam. And I'm wondering,
00:16:37
Speaker
We see, we see some remorse when, when she goes and talks to scammers and tells them about the consequences. And some of them know, but one of the theme that really continues to come up is the fact that the scam started with a pandemic because they had no jobs because they work in tourism and they work in something that requires meeting other people. And so I think that it looks like the pandemic and we've seen the same with pig butchering scams with casinos turned into
00:17:07
Speaker
Um, scam compounds, the pandemic has really impacted the, the workforce and people had turned to scams. And I wanted to ask you with your experience, can we turn back the table? Is there a way to infuse some morality and, and, you know, just you looking for two decades at the, at the Yahoo boys and understanding their modes of operation. They didn't start the pandemic. It's just another, I think, push.
00:17:37
Speaker
for everybody being online. Is there any hope in getting some moral into the minds of these criminals? So for the individuals that are committing the scam, I think they certainly realize the harm they're causing.
00:17:58
Speaker
They understand that, you know, they're causing kids to freak out, panic, and in some cases, kill themselves. We know in the case of Jordan Demet, one of those scammers learned about his suicide days later when he was Googling about it, and yet he still returned to doing sextortion.
00:18:17
Speaker
We know in the case of Gavin Guffey, that scammer ended up sending taunting messages to Gavin's brother and father after he died by suicide. So I don't know if there's a whole lot of hope from the morality perspective. I think these individuals who are committing this crime know exactly the impact that it's having.
Support and Education for Victims
00:18:39
Speaker
One of the things that strikes me the most is when I see some of these messages. And I want to talk a little bit about Reddit here as well. I know that people don't necessarily recommend to use Reddit for a lot of things and recommendations, but there is a subscription sub on Reddit and people turn to that and they do publish some of the communication and it's really, and same in the articles, it's horrible.
00:19:06
Speaker
They, the victim will say to the scammer, I'm going to take my life. And the scammer just completely, you know, just go ahead, do it, do it right now. Like teases them to take their own lives and.
00:19:19
Speaker
It's the end of a very long path of isolation and people don't care about you and all the bad things that will happen if these photos get out. And they really, really use deep psychology to manipulate these individuals. And we're talking about like 200, $300,000 that they're trying to get out of them. What are your thoughts about the six-dorsing sub on Reddit?
00:19:45
Speaker
So that seems to be the one well-moderated place, and it is the largest extortion support community. I would say that the scams one is also pretty good in terms of mostly people supporting each other. There are some people not as filled with empathy, but they're all, you know, I think the scams and sextortion I would recommend. But one thing that I found unique about sextortion is the empathy there.
00:20:14
Speaker
Absolutely. I've noticed that as well. You know, we see people going into that subreddit who are freaking out thinking their life is over.
00:20:23
Speaker
And in some cases openly say like, I don't see a way out of this unless I kill myself. So immediately, we seek guidance and help and encouragement, block them, here's how to exit the scam, here's how to report it to authorities. And yeah, just that something out there is helping people, I definitely support that.
00:20:48
Speaker
So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about what we could do about it. We as a society, we as professionals in the industry fighting fraud and crime. We as parents, we as human beings. Yeah. So when I first noticed that, you know, hey, this is a serious problem. Here are the threat actors behind it.
00:21:11
Speaker
I wanted to get that word out there. So I went to a nonprofit that focuses on publishing about online harms, digital harms, threat actors. They're called the Network Contagion Research Institute. So I pitched this idea to do some sort of investigative report on the Yahoo Boys and their role in financial sextortion. So our report was published in January. It got picked up by NBC News pretty much immediately.
00:21:40
Speaker
We've had some great impact from that. The platforms have implemented some of our recommendations and the platforms have started to moderate content related to those sextortion how-to guides, those methods, those scripts. So we are seeing some progress, but we definitely have further to go in terms of progress. Throughout the course of our research and our investigations into this subject,
00:22:06
Speaker
We've had connections with so many people who want to get involved to fight the scam. And here's the thing. These criminals are organized, but our response to them is not organized. And that's what we're trying to change. So we're bringing together global law enforcement agencies. We're bringing together reps from the United Nations. We're bringing together folks from the technology companies.
00:22:29
Speaker
parents, educators, financial institutions, all getting them in the same room and listening and learning and discussing, sharing ideas about how we're going to fight the scam together.
00:22:43
Speaker
That's amazing. You know, one of the things that, um, on, on the traffic episode on sextortion at the end, she says combating sextortion requires updated legislation, significant resources and collaboration between law enforcement agencies around the world. But these things rarely happen. So these crimes continue and so does the pain they cause and actually.
00:23:05
Speaker
you are trying to actually bring all of these together, law enforcement, legislation, and everyone. And I think everyone who contributes will really help with finding a solution. And the collaboration that you're driving here, I'm very hopeful that this is going to make a difference. One of the things that I firmly believe in is educating teens about this. In a large scale, I personally
00:23:34
Speaker
have been fortunate to be able to get and talk to eighth graders in our local schools. We're actually scheduling a seventh grader session now, and we talk about three topics, privacy and password protection, strangers online, and we focus it on the story of Jordan Demay and really talked about what not to do and what to do if it does happen to you. So not, yes, avoidance is really important, but what to do if it happens to you.
00:24:01
Speaker
and giving them the tools, but also talking to their parents and making them aware. But it was, you know, one school, one eighth grade class, and now seventh grade. I'm, to me, you know, this is a life-saving piece of information that they need to get. I'm questioning why is this not in the school curriculum? The whole point of strangers online and privacy. So how do you envision action here? So you're bringing everyone together.
00:24:31
Speaker
Yeah, so we definitely have to take a multidisciplinary approach here. We need to engage law enforcement, the financial institutions, the technology companies, as well as the education system and just kind of general awareness and getting this message across to teens. And I'm glad you brought up that quote from Mariana earlier. It's so right, but I want to make that quote wrong. Like, this collaboration rarely happens. She's right, but let's change that. Let's make this collaboration happen.
00:25:00
Speaker
As Erin West says, but what if we can? Exactly. Love it. So how do teens pay for, you know, pay scammers if they pay, which we highly recommend not to do. What modes, what forms of payment do they accept?
00:25:17
Speaker
given that typically the teens won't have bank accounts.
Financial Aspects of Sextortion
00:25:21
Speaker
The moment that blackmail begins, the first option that most of these gamers are using is Cash App. A lot of these teens have Cash App, and that's their primary peer-to-peer currency exchange system.
00:25:34
Speaker
If they don't have Cash App or some sort of P2P system like Zelle, perhaps, then the criminals say, you have to buy me gift cards. Use cash, use birthday money, use whatever you have lying around. Go to the store, get some gift cards, and send me the codes on the back.
00:25:51
Speaker
They also, we often see crypto exchange. That's a little bit more difficult because a lot of the younger victims don't have, you know, any sort of means to get crypto. But we're increasingly, increasingly seeing cash app used to transfer crypto as well in some of these cases. I think that that is going to potentially be easier to track. But I think although the scam is really
00:26:19
Speaker
profitable for the scammers. The concern here is less about the money. We're not talking about huge sums of money. It's more about the emotional impact on the victims as well.
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah, even some of these criminals though, they are running massive operations. One of them that was just caught was a $6 million blackmail operation. Another one was $2.5 million in victim payments. So there is definitely organization behind a lot of these criminals. And to your point, a lot of their victims being teens, they don't have a lot of money. They aren't making $10,000 transfers.
00:26:56
Speaker
So just imagine how many victims they had to have had in order to get $1.5 million, $2.5 million. So what can financial institutions, fraud fighters bring to the table here?
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah, so we certainly need the companies that are most affected by this considering, you know, Cash App, PayPal, Zelle, any of those peer-to-peer transfers. They need to be much better at account takeover recognition because what these criminals are doing, they understand their accounts are getting blocked and banned every couple of days, but they just have a list of accounts ready to go that have been targeted by account takeovers and hacked. So let's clarify that point.
00:27:40
Speaker
If I transfer money to a Yahoo boy or a criminal who's involved in sextortion, I don't transfer money to someone directly in Nigeria, right? We have to have mule accounts just like regular financial fraud. So we need to, how do they obtain these mule accounts?
00:27:58
Speaker
So you're never gonna be transferring wire payments to Nigeria in these cases. More often than not, you're using, the criminals are using cash up accounts that have been hacked or taken over either through breach passwords or credential stuffing. And what they do is they use those established real cash up accounts from other people that have been hacked and use those to transfer payment and ultimately cash out over on the other side
00:28:29
Speaker
So it's really a supply chain, right? That account takeover activity is work. So people have to go get a bunch of stolen data from the underground or the dark web and then do account takeover. And then they probably sell these cash app accounts or Zelle accounts or whatever that are now compromised. And those are purchased by groups that are executing sextortion and other types of scams as well.
00:28:59
Speaker
Absolutely. And each one of those scammers has a list of payments ready to go. If the victim doesn't have Cash App, then the criminal will offer them a Zelle. Then they'll offer them, you know, the next account all the way going down the line.
00:29:14
Speaker
We've even seen criminals, all right, well, if you don't have that, you don't have that, create me an account at login.gov, you know, something for them to execute another scam against the federal government. So, you know, they use these victims to not only send payment, but hey, create a Snapchat account for me, create an Instagram account for me.
00:29:33
Speaker
Um, but to your point, they're, they're purchasing these lists and mass. So if you report a cash up account, they have their next cash up account ready to go within minutes. Truly a game of whack-a-mole there. It is exactly.
00:29:52
Speaker
A few weeks ago, you and some other colleagues in the industry have hosted a webinar on the topic of sextortion. And I wanted to ask you if you can share a little bit about the topics that the webinar covered as well as outcomes, if there's anything to share so far.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So like you mentioned, a number of organizations came together to host a webinar to basically combat sex torsion. We had folks from the social media industry, financial industry, parents, and the webinar was really composed of three parts.
00:30:31
Speaker
The first part, we heard from the parents who lost their kids to this scam, to financial sextortion. And that was honestly the most powerful part of the event, for sure. Just putting humans behind the statistics and the numbers, like these are real people with real lives. And this scam has had devastating outcomes on these families and so many more around the world.
00:30:56
Speaker
The second part of the webinar was kind of looking at the scope of the problem. So we had NICMIC, we had the Canadian Center for Child Protection, and we had the NCRI discuss the scope of the problem. You know, how many victims, where is it all coming from, and basically our research on the topic. And basically answering that question of how this crime has exploded over the past two years, mainly because the Yahoo boys have been sharing their scripts and their methods quite openly online, recruiting others to engage in the scam.
00:31:26
Speaker
And then part three of the webinar, we heard from folks in the social media industry, financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and that was to address the solutions. What are we currently doing and what are we not currently doing that we need to do to combat this crime? So the event left us with a lot of actionable items to really take back and be able to make a dent in this crime together in a more organized fashion.
00:31:56
Speaker
Did it feel like the tech companies understand the severity of the situation? What was their message on the webinar?
Social Media's Role and Response
00:32:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think in particular the social media platforms understand the gravity of the situation now. We had leaders from many of the involved organizations and companies attending and listening firsthand to the parents about the impact that that platform has had on their families. So yeah, I'm hopeful that some of these companies are starting to take it seriously, but others still have quite a ways to go to make a dent in this crime.
00:32:35
Speaker
So from your lens as an intelligence analyst, what advice would you give to social media companies such as Mena, for example, in order to combat sextortion? And yes, they have their own limitations and their perspective of the platform and all the considerations that they need to take. But what would you provide as advice to them if you could tackle this head on?
00:33:03
Speaker
Absolutely. So I think there are some very practical steps that they can do that really, you know, is not going to impact their overall bottom line, but it's just going to make their platform a safer place for everybody.
00:33:16
Speaker
The first thing that I think META can do to really reduce the suicides from this crime is make teens' follower and following lists always private by default. We know that these lists are the primary source of leverage used in almost all of the financial extortion scams targeting kids.
00:33:34
Speaker
you know, as soon as that blackmail picture is sent or taken, the leverage they use is, hey, I've screenshoted all your friends, your followers, your family, pay me money, or else this is getting sent to all of them. So Meta can really take away that leverage by having a more private network for these teens and not having their friends list exposed the moment that they accept the request of a scammer. Secondly,
00:34:02
Speaker
These platforms can classify the Yahoo boys under their dangerous organizations and individuals policy. This is a policy that Meta already has in place. And it's been effective in deplatforming ISIS and Al-Qaeda and other groups that are already classified under this policy. So the Yahoo boys, their newest scams are violent. They are causing mass harm. So I think it would be appropriate to classify the Yahoo boys
00:34:30
Speaker
as a dangerous organization and truly deplatform them. So that means that there are analysts at Meta whose job is to keep people on that list off platform. Their sole responsibility is to keep ISIS off, keep Al-Qaeda, you know, other dangerous organizations and entities. So classifying Yahoo Boys here, you know, you have an army of analysts now going after these groups and kicking them off platform.
00:34:57
Speaker
So one thing I've noticed, especially in complaints amongst victims of this crime, is that meta is extremely slow to respond to reports about sex torsion. You know, if a kid is being blackmailed in that moment by a scammer, they're reporting these posts and reporting these messages. Meta oftentimes doesn't get back to them for a couple days sometimes.
00:35:21
Speaker
Um, and oftentimes what they get back is, you know, the message that, hey, this, this doesn't violate our community guidelines. So I think Metta can do a lot better on the moderation processes here. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I noticed when looking at the sub on Reddit for sextortion is that the teens reaching out there, they need help right now in the moment and they instantly get help from other
00:35:47
Speaker
people on that sub, they get the empathy, they get the guidance. And I think that Meta or other companies that are involved in this have the capability to monitor the conversation and see that something is off and provide guidance in that moment. So taking that extra step could go a long way in saving lives.
00:36:08
Speaker
That's for sure. And I think the fourth step here is we know that a lot of these catfish accounts and these fake accounts are using the same images repeatedly as their profile pictures or via DMs to these teens.
00:36:24
Speaker
And Meta, of course, has the capability to do facial recognition or image matching to see that the same image has been used across hundreds or even thousands of profiles sometimes. So one thing Meta could possibly do is hash those images or use facial recognition to ensure that these fake accounts don't continue to proliferate using the same exact photos. It's easily detectable.
00:36:49
Speaker
So that's going to be a little tricky because we know that when it comes to reports on fake profiles that are used in romance scams, Facebook and other social media companies don't always take down those duplicate accounts.
00:37:05
Speaker
that are reported, that has been a challenge because it does contradict their goal of having a large number of accounts for advertising. So that's one of the examples where the interests do not always align. And I hope there's a way to get around this, to take down those profiles that are used in cases of sextortion, that are used in cases of romance scams. That is an ongoing challenge.
00:37:32
Speaker
These extortion accounts actually follow a very clear pattern. A lot of these are account takeovers or hacked accounts that they're using then to reach out to numerous victims. So Meta can detect account takeovers by the first time that account logs in within a certain high-risk IP range or high-risk geography, then these accounts do a username change, and then they start to follow
00:38:00
Speaker
dozens or hundreds of usually teenage boys all at the same time. So the accounts are all following a same pattern and that's very unusual behavior and something that they can detect and try to prevent against. And this is definitely something that we can take learnings from how we combat account take over front and online banking and take those lessons to social media as well. Obviously we don't expect them to stop traffic from a certain location. It's that combination
00:38:29
Speaker
of hundreds of risk factors that we can learn over time really apply to these situations. So you mentioned suddenly following many teens, you mentioned an IP range. Definitely we can apply the back coloring concept of if we've seen this account involved in some kind of crime, what can we learn about the modes of operation? What can we learn about the IP, the location, the device?
00:38:55
Speaker
So many things that we've already been doing for years with financial institutions, we can also deploy with regards to accounts in other realms. And we've been doing this at financial institutions, at merchants, definitely could be applied to accounts within social media. It's really about stepping up and doing this.
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah. So actually a couple of weeks ago, Meta had put out a press release saying that they would send a safety notice to any users who had actually been in contact with a sextortion criminal. If that goes out to everybody who has ever been targeted by a sextortion account, I think that would be a wonderful piece of education. As long as, you know, that safety notice provides resources, material, signs to recognize these accounts.
00:39:43
Speaker
Um, problem is we haven't seen that go out yet. So we're still waiting and we hope that is, that it is effective as a, they plan for it to be. I definitely think Amanda should send out a safety note to everyone, not just victims of the crimes, but everyone in a preventative manner, in a way to educate, in a way to alert and provide that awareness that we could all use, uh, everyone in their platform.
00:40:10
Speaker
Okay, so let's talk about some good news. There has been a little progress in, at least on the government level, in collaborating with Nigeria.
International Cooperation Against Sextortion
00:40:18
Speaker
Can you share a little bit about that?
00:40:22
Speaker
Yeah, so earlier this week, we got some really great news from the Department of State. They are getting involved in this fight, and they are actually going to deploy a cybercrime advisor to Nigeria to help combat sex torsion, as well as other types of fraud affiliated with Yahoo Boys. So optimistic that that role and that person will do a good job. And at least now we know there's a whole other government agency in this fight on our side.
00:40:51
Speaker
That's great. I can't wait to see progress in that sense. And it's great that Nigeria is willing to accept this level of involvement and advice. Those collaborations are going to truly be able to help in making a dent in those crimes and hopefully stopping them.
00:41:11
Speaker
I wanted to plug in here again that I really think it's important to talk to teens. It's our job as parents. It's our job as front fighters in the community. I'm happy to share the materials that I am using to go to schools and talk to kids and feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to help and provide those materials to you.
00:41:30
Speaker
So Paul, thank you so much for driving awareness on this topic for everything that you do. You're just exploding now in the news talking about this topic. The Guardian, Yahoo News, Wired, NBC, BBC. So keep up the good fight and wishing you a lot of success in fighting this crime. And thank you so much for being on the podcast and joining me today.
00:41:58
Speaker
It's been such a treat to be here. Thank you so much for the kind words.