On the Hunt for the Men Blackmailing Minors Online

It starts with a message.

A stranger follows a teenage boy online. She seems to be around the same age. They have things in common. They start talking. The conversation turns flirtatious. An explicit picture is sent, and the stranger asks for one back.

Then the threat comes: Pay, or everyone you know will see it.

Except this time, the teenager isn’t real.

Inside the scam: It takes mere hours to turn a stranger into a victim

On the other side of the screen are Erin West, a former prosecutor, investigator, and founder of Operation Shamrock, and Paul Raffile, a cybercrime researcher. They have built a profile designed to look like it belongs to a teenage boy online scammers would target. Within only a few hours, they are being blackmailed.

It was really frightening. Even though you know it's a fake profile, and you're not actually in danger, I found myself thinking about my own boys—they're both in college and right in this age range. The idea that someone is ready to embarrass you, expose you to your friends and family, and do you harm is terrifying. When you don't know who's on the other side of that screen and they're saying those horrible things to you, it's traumatic—even knowing it isn't real.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock

The stakes are difficult to put into numbers. This form of sextortion is linked to dozens of teenage deaths by suicide in the US alone. The FBI has documented more than 12,600 victims of financially motivated sextortion of minors in the US between October 2021 and March 2023, primarily boys, with at least 20 suicides reported in that period.

We tend to think romance scams take time. A fraudster builds a relationship, earns trust, waits for the right moment, and eventually asks for money.

What the scammers are doing to teens can move much faster.

A teenager can meet someone online, believe they are talking to another young person, exchange intimate images, and find themselves being threatened within hours. The FBI says victims of financially motivated sextortion are typically boys aged 14 to 17, although any child can be targeted. The offenders are often outside the US, with Nigeria and other West African countries among the locations identified by investigators.

The speed is part of what makes the crime so effective. Once the scammer has a sensitive image, the teenager is left with a threat that can feel immediate and irreversible: send money or the image is shown to parents, friends, classmates, or everyone else online.

And the demands can keep coming. Paying once does not necessarily end the blackmail. The FBI has warned that offenders often demand more money even after a victim complies.

Erin West wanted to know who was on the other side of that threat.

Following the blackmail to Nigeria

The teenage boy West and Raffile had invented—the profile, the flirtation, the photo—had done its job. They had the messages, the demands, and a rough sense of who was sending them: not a teenager, not nearby. Then they decided to see how far they could trace it. Working with Kitboga, another prominent scam-baiter, they got the scammer to show his face and to interact with a tool that narrowed down where he was. No exact address—but enough to place him in Lagos, Nigeria.

The investigation had moved from a screen to a physical place. What they still didn't have was the part that never comes through in a chat log: who he was, how he found his targets, what the work looked like from his side. So they booked flights to Lagos.

Watch the full investigation. Erin West and Paul Raffile recorded every step of the investigation—the decoy account, the trace to Lagos, and what they found when they got there. 

“I know who you are”

In Lagos, the investigation had to move the old-fashioned way—they needed help from someone who knew how to dig out more information, and they knew just the right person.

Through Gary Warner, a professor and cybercrime fighter, the phone number became a bank account. That bank account became a real name. And finally, the name became a place on a map.

They went there… But nobody was home. Refusing to give up, West called the scammer’s number, and he answered the phone.

I expected him to hang up. Instead, he kept trying to explain it away. The story didn't make sense, and every answer raised another question. But what surprised me most was how his tone changed once I became more direct. You could tell he was scared. He realized we knew where he lived, and when I mentioned law enforcement, everything changed. After the call, he made his TikTok account private and changed the account name. He knew this was serious.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock

The man on the other end denied being the person they were looking for. He said he was a working man who sold shoes and slippers. When West asked him to show his face, he refused, but Erin pushed harder.

She told him she was a former prosecutor. Told him she knew his social media accounts, his phone numbers, his friends, and where he lived. Then she told him what his work was doing.

It is killing teenage boys.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock

West had come to Nigeria to find the person behind the blackmail. Now she was talking directly to him.

I know who you are and you’re going to jail.

Erin West

Founder of Operation Shamrock

He hung up.

The team turned the information they had gathered over to the Nigerian authorities, but as of the time of writing, there have been no arrests.

One arrest won’t stop the machine

After the confrontation, West asks the people she has met in Nigeria a simple question: What would help? What would make this stop?

The answer was consistent: Arrests. More arrests.

They’re not wrong. Criminals who target children should be investigated and prosecuted.

However, an arrest comes after the threat has already been made—after the image has already been obtained and a teenager has already spent hours wondering whether their family and friends are about to see something they never wanted to share.

The scammer may be sitting in Nigeria, but the crime does not belong to one country. It runs through the social media platforms where the first contact happens, messaging apps where conversations move, payment services and gift cards used to demand money, and crypto platforms that can turn a threat into cash.

The infrastructure and responsibility are both spread across borders.

It’s not enough to say that Nigeria needs to arrest more scammers. Parents cannot be expected to monitor every message their children receive. Schools cannot solve a problem that begins on global platforms. And platforms alone cannot dismantle criminal networks operating across jurisdictions. 

A stranger should not be able to reach a child, impersonate someone their age, obtain an intimate image, and turn it into a threat without encountering meaningful barriers along the way.

Awareness in schools can help teenagers recognize the pattern before they are trapped inside it. Platforms can make it harder for strangers to contact minors and harder for intimate materials to become a weapon. Companies moving the money can add another layer of friction.

None of those measures replace arrests, but arrests often happen when too much harm is already done.

Most teenagers will not have a former prosecutor by their side, tracing the person who just threatened them. The opportunity to stop the next sextortion case comes much earlier—before the stranger reaches the child, before the image is sent, before the countdown starts.

This is the second installment in Erin West's ongoing investigation series with Sumsub. In the first piece, West traveled to Cambodia to see whether the country's crackdown on scam compounds was real—and found multi-story compounds at the end of dirt roads, "shut down" facilities still fully wired to restart, and an industry that had adapted rather than retreated.

Read about Erin's trip to Cambodia and what she found in our previous article.

Sumsub and Erin West are on a mission to raise awareness about how these scams operate, because a scam that people recognize is a scam that stops working. If you know a teenager—or a parent of one—pass this story along.

The field investigations continue. West is already planning a third trip, and we'll be publishing what she finds there soon.