FBI's Operation Artemis Brings Sextortion Charges Against 22 Nigerians
Sextortion is a crime in which adult predators, often posing as young girls, contact teenage boys on a variety of online platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and gaming apps and then lure the teenage boys into providing nude photos or videos or engage in explicit sexual activity online not knowing it is being recorded. The sextortionist then threatens to post the photos or videos online unless a substantial payment is made, generally by gift cards or cryptocurrencies.
Between October 2024 and March 2025, the FBI reported a 30% increase in reported sextortion crimes and the number of actual occurrences is most likely significantly higher. The number of reported victims increased from 34,000 in 2023 to 54,000 in 2024. The FBI estimates that in the past two years criminals have taken in payments of more than $65 million from sextortion victims. Even more disturbingly, the FBI attributes at least 20 suicides of young boys to sextortion.
Recently the FBI announced Operation Artemis, a joint effort with law enforcement partners in Canada, Australia, Nigeria and the United Kingdom targeting sextortion criminals in Nigeria resulted in the arrest of 22 Nigerians alleged to be connected to sophisticated, organized sextortion rings. According to the FBI, half of those arrested were directly linked to sextortion victims who committed suicide.
In 2023 South Carolina passed a bill called Gavin's Law that criminalized extorting minors or at-risk adults. It was named after the son of a South Carolina legislator whose teenage son committed suicide after being a victim of sextortion. One of the men arrested through Operation Artemis, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal has been charged with being the sextortionist whose actions led to the suicide of Gavin Guffey. He is presently awaiting trial in South Carolina on charges of child exploitation resulting in death, distribution of child sexual abuse material, coercion and enticement of a minor, cyberestalking, and interstate threats with intent to extort.
Making the sextortion problem even worse is an upsurge in sextortion assistance companies which charge thousands of dollars for their help in stopping and removing the photos and videos from appearing online. According to the FBI these companies provide no better assistance than you can get for free and, in some instances, actually are the same criminals perpetrating the sextortion scams themselves. Some offer to send cease and desist orders which sound good but are totally unenforceable. Ads for sextortion assistance companies appear throughout social media and even in posts on victim support forums.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a free service for minors entitled Take It Down, which has been approved by the FBI, that can remove images from cooperating social media platforms, but not from text messaging platforms. Victims of sextortion who are over 18 can use the free platform Stopncii.org which uses similar technology to that used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to remove videos and photos from social media platforms.
In a positive development, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram removed 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that were being used for sextortion. They also removed thousands of Facebook accounts and 5,700 Facebook Groups in Nigeria that were used by scammers to sell scripts and guides to criminals seeking to profit from sextortion.
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to take the faces and images of people in photographs and videos and put them into realistic appearing pornographic videos has been with us since 2017 although until recently it had been primarily used to create deepfake pornographic videos using the faces of famous actresses such as Gal Gadot, Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. Recently, however, the technology has been used by criminals for purposes of sextortion. The FBI has issued a warning about this crime.
Meta has removed advertising on Facebook and Instagram for an AI app called CrushAI that allowed users to generate fake nude photos from regular photos. Sextortion criminals use apps such as this for purposes of sextortion using a conventional non-nude photo provided by the sextortion victim.
The FBI advises parents to tell their children to be very careful as to what they share online. Social media accounts which are open to everyone provide predators and scammers with much information that the scammers can use to lure people into scams. Parents should discuss the appropriate privacy settings with their children for all of their accounts.
Parents should also specifically discuss the dangers of sextortion with their children as well as remind them that they can never be sure as to who they are communicating with online and they should be particularly skeptical if they meet someone on a game or app who then asks to communicate with them on a different platform.
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