Overview
The victim expects to avoid a legal or criminal charge of sex offenses for sending explicit messages and images to an allegedly underage person on a dating app.
How It Works
The scammer, impersonating a potential romantic interest, targets the victim on social media and begins sending flirtatious messages. The targeted victim is usually a male with a high status job (military, business).
The scammer engages in online flirting and gets the victim to send nudes.
The scammer, now posing as the parent of the romantic interest, contacts the victim and claims the romantic interest is actually underage and says that the victim has committed a crime by sending sexually explicit images.
The scammer now begins to extort the victim for money, using threats of legal action to convince the victim to pay.
Related Articles
'Sextortion' scams continue to occur; don't give into scammer's demands, Joint Base San Antonio News (US military)
The Phone Call from Hell, WIRED
Related Scams
Related Crime Schemes
A particular instance of this scam may embed one or more of these related schemes.
Extortion: Extortion refers to any scheme that uses a threat of additional damage to extract payment from the victim.
Victim Targeting Context
The scammer may use one or more of the following techniques to reach the victim.
Targeted Conversational Approach: The scammer approaches the victim through online conversation or other targeted method.
Social Engineering: Psychological Manipulations
The scammer may use one or more of these psychological techniques to accomplish the scam.
Authority: The scammer employs an abuse of a position of authority to convince the victim to go along with the scam.
Guilt/Pity/Sympathy: The scammer tries to make victim feel guilt or pity toward scammer or others in order to escalate the scam.
Shame: The scammer tries to make the victim feel some shame or embarrassment in order to get them to go along with the scam.
Threats: The scammer employs threats to increase fear in the victim so that they will go along with the scam. Threats can include financial loss, legal action, arrest, account closure, extortion, blackmail.
Urgency: The scammer employs urgency to increase the likelihood that the victim will take action.
Social Engineering: Impersonation Techniques
The scammer may impersonate one or more of the following groups as part of the scam.
Catfish: The perpetrator creates a fictitious online profile or persona.