You’re scrolling through Facebook like any other day, when a friend request pops up from a pretty girl.
You accept, and she sends you a naughty picture. You send one back, just to be polite, or maybe because she asked nicely. Maybe you move the conversation onto Skype for a live show.
But then she asks for money. She wants hundreds of dollars, or she’ll send your naked photo to your friends, your family — and worst of all — your command.
Hundreds of troops every year are falling directly into this trap, and many of them are handing over thousands of dollars to try to make the problem go away, to no avail, experts warn of this increasingly common ploy to extort U.S. service members.
“She’s like, you know, ‘I’m angry. You don’t want to make me angry. Here’s how not to make me angry,’ ” recalled one junior sailor, who exchanged sexy Skype videos with someone he met online.
Minutes later, the scammer threatened to ruin his reputation and career unless he forked over cash.
“If these individuals pay at all, [the scammers] will ask for more money,” Naval Criminal Investigative Service division chief Megan Bolduc told Military Times in a phone interview.
Law enforcement officials have dubbed the scam “sextortion,” and it happens all over the world. Service members are particularly vulnerable, experts say. They have a steady income and their conduct is regulated.
Four services have put out guidance about the problem, counting several dozen reports to several hundred reports since the scam first surfaced in 2012. Victims and special agents said troops are often targeted by criminals overseas and offered some tips to protect yourself from this scam that’s gotten as much as $10,000 from individual service members.
Many of the victims in the Navy and Marine Corps are in the E-1 to E-4 range, according to NCIS intelligence specialist Katherine McDonald, away from home for the first time and trying to create connections in the world.
“These perpetrators know that they have a steady income by being military. They know they get paid on the 1st, they get paid on the 15th,” Bolduc said.
“These perpetrators also know that they’re held to a higher standard. Threatening that their career may go down the drain is terrifying to a young service member.”
Despite outreach efforts, the problem continues to grow.
The number of cases has shot up in recent years, McDonald said, from 60 in fiscal year 2014 to more than twice that in FY 2016.
“Part of that, too, is that we have gotten the word out in so many different ways and encouraged reporting,” Bolduc added. “I think people are more willing to come forward, but incidents are also increasing.”
Still, for all of the reports, NCIS hasn’t been able to prosecute a single perpetrator. So the only thing to do is warn troops to not send compromising photos or videos to strangers on the internet.
And if you do, absolutely do not pay them, experts say.
Protecting yourself
“You wanna go over to Skype?” she asked after a few minutes of chatting on Adult Friend Finder. They both undressed for their web cams. It was his first time engaging with anyone like that on the site, said an East Coast-based junior sailor.
But when it was over, it wasn’t really over.
The sailor, who was put in contact with Military Times by his NCIS special agent, agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity to discuss how he was targeted.
He doesn’t know whether the person he spoke to was actually a woman, because “she” said her microphone was broken. Experts say scammers often use pre-recorded video, sometimes stolen, to entice victims.
She demanded $150 — a common low starting point that will ratchet up with each payment — or said she would send the video to his family and friends. But the sailor didn’t hand over any money. His first move was to talk to his E-6 supervisor.
“I talked to him because he’s a relatively rugged individual, for the most part. He and I got along pretty well,” the sailor said. “I just felt like he’d probably know what to do or how to deal with it.”
The E-6 knew exactly what the sailor was talking about, he said, and tried to put it in perspective.
“Does she really have any actual rock solid names of anybody you know?” he asked. “What are you worried about?”
The sailor reported the incident to his senior chief and then to NCIS. Within a week he had met with an agent and handed over the saved messages. The scammer did try to contact him one more time, he said, but he didn’t respond, and he hasn’t seen that Skype account online again.
He was a little concerned that his video might go online, though.
“I searched about it a few times myself. I never found anything,” he said. “I don’t have a Facebook or other large social media, which I think helps in that this person wasn’t able to track down anybody that I knew.”
That’s part of his advice to other service members, he added, similar to what NCIS offers: If you’re going to be on social media at all, don’t publish pictures in uniform and don’t list your job.
“My advice is that essentially, if they ever say they can threaten your security clearance, they really can’t,” he said. “As long as you report it, it’s highly unlikely that anything’s going to happen to you.”
And if you’re going to chat with strangers online, don’t be so quick to get undressed.
“Just try to get to know people a little better,” he said. “Try to get a little more out of them before you try to do anything interesting.”
NCIS sent a notice over to his command about the incident, he said, but he’s never been approached by leadership about it.
Sinister scams
Since August 2012, when NCIS first started seeing reports of sextortion scams, about 300 sailors and Marines have come forward, Bolduc said.
Of those, about 60 percent paid their extorters — some more than $10,000, McDonald added.
The Air Force began seeing cases around the same time, Office of Special Investigations spokeswoman Linda Card told Military Times, mostly Skype-based and coming from the Philippines, as well as the Ivory Coast in western Africa.
The service has received about 70 sextortion reports in the past 3 1/2 years she said, but OSI has left their investigation to civilian law enforcement agencies because none of the perpetrators were in the Air Force.
The Army has had a “handful” of cases, according to Criminal Investigation Command spokesman Chris Grey, who couldn’t provide more precise numbers.
All of the services have issued sextortion training for commands and have released press releases and warnings of the dangers in the past few months.
The scams come in two varieties, according to the NCIS experts, who are working with members of Army CID and Air Force OSI to craft Defense Department strategy and guidance.
The most popular is on Facebook, and as far as NCIS has seen, is run by organized groups in the Philippines.
The threat first came to NCIS’ attention in late 2012, when officials from Facebook Singapore reached out to let them know targeted stateside sailors and Marines had reported a bunch of accounts based in the Philippines as potential scammers.
In those cases, service members received friend requests and messages from accounts claiming to belong to women. They exchanged photos, and then their new friends started demanding money.
“It can take anywhere from minutes to days to a couple of weeks, especially with the Philippines scam,” McDonald said. “People start undressing within minutes of accepting that friend request.”
Some of the exchanges happen over video chat. The extorter will play a pornographic video of a woman, encouraging the service member to join in, before revealing that the entire session was recorded.
The amounts demanded generally start small — $100, $500 — ratcheting up to the thousands as long as the service member continues to pay.
Philippine officials busted one of those rings this year, McDonald said, arresting an office of 50. The organization had a payroll and offered bonuses to employees who got the most money from victims.
It’s tough to prosecute on behalf of service members, however, because the Philippines requires that a victim come in person to file a report.
The other scam is much more sinister. These perpetrators are based in the U.S., Bolduc said, and troll free dating sites like Plenty of Fish and MeetMe.com.
Their approach is more gradual. They’ll strike up a conversation with a service member, start to form a relationship, and then start sending pictures.
Days or weeks later, the service member will get a call from someone claiming that the girl is underage.
Pay me or I’ll tell the cops, he’ll say.
This happened to one service member who told NCIS that a woman contacted him through Facebook to ask for money to help pay for her grandmother’s surgery.
“She sent me a nude picture and asked for one from me. She wanted to meet me to have sex with me,” the victim said, according to interview notes provided to Military Times.
“After I hadn’t talked to her for a while I got a message from a guy saying I had to pay for the damage I had done to her,” he recalled the man saying, while threatening to have him arrested.
“So now our poor service member believes that he’s in possession of child pornography,” McDonald said. “The guy says he is her father. He wants money to pay for mental health treatment — maybe says she attempted suicide — in exchange for not reporting it.”
Then, perhaps, another man will call, claiming to be local law enforcement and encouraging the service member to pay the girl’s father.
Or, in one case, the suspect posed as an NCIS agent, according to spokesman Ed Buice.
Then the panic can really set in.
“A service member who feels like they’ve been duped into taking their pants off and paying money is one thing, but it ratchets way up when the service member thinks that he has been sent child pornography,” Buice said. “Now he’s willing to do anything, and pay any amount of money, to keep his secret.”
The thing that both of these scams have in common is that there’s most likely not a woman involved at all.
“This is all scripted,” Buice said. “This is all dinner theater.”
The photos sent are often just stolen from Instagram or Google images, and the woman whose likeness is being used won’t even know her pictures are involved.
“When the scheme first came to our attention, they were using photos of active-duty female Marines to help legitimize their profiles,” McDonald said. “Because if it’s a fellow Marine, I’m more likely to accept that friend request.”
When a sailor or Marine makes a report, NCIS runs all of the images through the International Crimes Against Children database, to make sure they don’t match any known, exploited underage girls.
NCIS, CID and OSI also tell the service member to cease communications, save all communication they’ve had, and above all, don’t send a dime.
Dangerous game
According to Army CID, some of these scammer rings target service members exclusively. So far, it seems they’re just after steady incomes and a strong fear of losing their jobs, McDonald said, but officials are concerned it could get worse.
For example, she added, four civilians in the United Kingdom have committed suicide after being caught up in a sextortion scheme.
A 17 year-old boy took his life in February after he had been targeted by a Philippines-based ring, the
BBC reported.
In the U.S., law enforcement has been busting sextortion king pins, like a Minnesota man who targeted more than 150 underage boys, the
Washington Post
reported.
According to more than 600 agencies surveyed in the National Child Exploitation Threat Assessment, enticement of children online is on the rise.
And for service members, many of those targeted are newly enlisted and just barely of age.
“People ask us why we care about a service member dropping his pants and paying $200 to some foreign national,” she said. “The concern really is twofold: the concern of harm to themselves, and on a national security level, a lot of these service members do have clearances.”
The fear is that foreign enemies could use the same tricks to extract sensitive information from service members.
“The biggest thing for us has really been a focus on prevention, because prosecution is just not something we’re sure about right now,” Bolduc said.
