Suspected sextortion blackmailer "made £2million" threatening to release embarrassing pictures and videos of boys
Olamide Shanu, 33, will appear in court in London later this month after an extradition request from the United States.
Shanu is accused of posing online as a teenage girl to persuade boys to send sexually explicit photos.
It is alleged he then threatened to send the compromising images to his victims’ families, friends and even the media if they refused to pay him.
At least three British schoolchildren have killed themselves as a result of being blackmailed over sexually explicit images. One alleged victim set up a payment plan with Shanu, sending him £240 a week until he had handed the blackmailer almost £8,000. Shanu’s cryptocurrency account is believed to have received more than 6,000 payments over three years, leading investigators to estimate the number of victims to be into the hundreds.
The National Crime Agency issued a stark warning last week, stating that schoolchildren were being targeted in sextortion scams.
They said the number of cases involving children has increased massively in two years, to 890 in 2022.
High profile cases have included Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane, Scotland who died in December last year after being targeted in a blackmail plot with possible links to Nigeria.
Dinal de Alwis, 16, from Sutton, south London was also the victim of blackmail.
An inquest heard in February that the private schoolboy had taken his own life in 2022 after a blackmailer threatened to send nude photos to all of his social media followers if he did not send them money.
The Times reported that the threat is believed to have come from Nigeria. Shanu, who is Nigerian, is accused of being involved in an international blackmail scam. He was arrested in Surrey at the end of last year and is due to appear at Westminster magistrates’ court on May 28.
The alleged blackmailer is wanted in the US on charges including conspiracy to cyberstalk, interstate communications with intent to commit extortion and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The US Secret Service has alleged that Shanu and other conspirators used fake and stolen online profiles with pictures of attractive women to target boys through Instagram and other social media platforms.
They then persuaded their victims to send explicit images and videos of themselves and even to appear naked in ‘live chat’ sessions while the conspirators posed as adult film actresses to hide their true identity.
The victims were threatened and blackmailed into making payments either through gift cards or via cryptocurrency.
Blackmailers also used stolen Snapchat accounts to target American victims.
One, who was contacted in May last year, believed he was chatting to Chloe Walterz but the account had been stolen from a 16-year-old girl.
The boy handed over $1,000 before blocking the account.
Another US victim was also targeted by ‘Chloe’ on Instagram.
The boy believed he was talking to a young, white woman and through Snapchat, exchanged sexually explicit images.
‘Chloe’ then threatened to expose the photos to 200 of the boy’s female friends and under threat paid the blackmailer $300 every Friday until he had transferred a total of $10,000.
The payments were all traced to an account in Binance, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, which was opened using Shanu’s passport as proof of identity along with an address in Lagos.
By the time the account had been traced, it had been emptied, of $2.6 million-worth of bitcoin amassed in the previous three years.
Luke Lack, a Secret Service special agent, wrote in the criminal complaint that the Binance account had received funds from victims of various frauds, including sextortion and romance scams.
Secret Service investigators allegedly linked the account to email addresses containing other identity documents belonging to Shanu, and screenshots of messages showing his involvement in the sextortion scheme including one with the name Chloe Walterz.
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