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Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

There's a scam going around targeting teenage boys that I don't see people talking about. Scammer poses as a cute teenage girl on Snapchat/TikTok/Instagram and starts DMing a teenage boy late at night. Eventually convinces boy to send a dick pic, then reveals himself and says, "Got you! I'm going to send that dick pic to your parents and everyone at your school unless you send me money!" The scammers will even voice call them at this point and threaten them that way.

The boy that got scammed is so embarrassed that they won't tell anyone and they send the money.

It seems they must be carefully targeting relatively clean cut (so they'll be sure to be embarrassed) and wealthy kids (so they actually have $300 to send). It's mind blowing how well these scammers do their homework

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Variations of this have been going around for years. Sometimes scammers will even work with cam models to record victims sexting over videoconference.

At one point they were targeting Muslim men because they knew the cultural implications of those videos being sent to their communities. I remember reading a story about a raft of suicides linked to that particular scam.

There’s also less sophisticated versions where the scammer will only claim to have hacked the victim’s webcam and demand money to avoid sending it to the victim’s friend list on social media.

After reading about this, I bought a bunch of cheap plastic webcam covers to give to everyone I know. They were only ~$1/ea on Amazon and work great.

That’s a pretty old scam, but kids these days seem to have easier access to credit cards than when I was growing up, so I expect it is quite lucrative.

They did this to US service men. The scammers claimed to be underaged girls and they would ruin the soldiers reputation unless they paid.

Some committed suicide from the shame.

Do you feel any sorrow about pedophiles willing to abuse kids removing themselves from society?

You can join the US military at 18. An 18 year old dating a 17 year old is not a pedophile. What if the girl said she was 18 and then she reveals later she isn't?

The problem is US law is so fucked up that having sex with someone that's days younger than you can be illegal and punishable by labeling you as a sex offender for the rest of your life. Even if the other person had a fake id and lied to you!

Lots of countries have "Romeo & Juliet Laws" that decriminalizes sex with minors if both parties are within a few years of each other. For example, France has the age of consent at 15, and decriminalizes sex with under 15s if both parties are within 5 years of each other. There are caveats: the exception doesn't apply if one party has legal or factual authority over the victim, or are related.

It varies by state here but a lot of people don’t know what their state considers legal.

The implication I got from that comment is that they would claim to be underage after receiving the photos.

Flight of the Intruder (the novel, less the movie) is very much based on sextortion.

This extortion is so common that it has an entire subreddit devoted to it (/r/sextortion) and it's often busier than the /r/scams subreddit.

In addition to those resources, Episode 4 of the Netflix series "Web of Make Believe" is basically a one hour documentary all about how sextortion operations work. Every episode of that series is solid gold.

What's terrifying after the cultural secretiveness of sex, is the legal position this puts a minor; if a 17 year old goes to the authorities, some jurisdictions would legally be required to file against the victim for creating child pornography.

> There's a scam going around targeting teenage boys that I don't see people talking about.

Its not just teenagers, they target older men. I get requests on whatsapp from profiles with an attractive woman's display pic. I sometimes accept these requests and chat with them. They all want to have a video call on whatsapp.

I have never done any video calls with these scammers but their end goal is to have a video call where the woman might be wearing revealing clothes or even nude, get a screenshot where your face is on the call and then blackmail you, if you dont pay up that screenshot will be sent to your contacts.

There's a Black Mirror episode with this plot.

I mean.. did you watch to the end of the episode? In the episode the scammers were targeting people trafficking child pornography, so it's a bit harder to empathize.

I don't know why spoilers are relevant to this thread

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