FBI’s Operation Artemis Brings Sextortion Charges Against 22 Nigerians
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FBI in joint law enforcement action arrests 22 Nigerians charged with sextortion
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July 5, 2025
05:29 PM
Forbes
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MoneyPersonal FinanceFBI’s Operation Artemis Brings Sextortion Charges Against 22 NigeriansBySteve Weisman, Contributor
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights
Steve Weisman writes white-collar crime
AuthorJul 05, 2025, 05:29pm EDTSouth Carolina Rep
Branon Guffey speaks to senators outside the House chamber in Columbia, South
More Carolina, Wednesday, May 2, 2023
Guffey’s 17-year-old son took his own life in July 2022 after a Nigerian man posed as a woman and then tried to extort the teen after he sent nude photos. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)Copyright 2025 The Associated Press
Sextortion is a crime in which adult predators, often posing as young girls, teenage boys on a variety of online platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and gaming apps and then lure the teenage boys into viding nude photos or s or engage in explicit sexual activity online not knowing it is being recorded
The sextortionist then threatens to post the photos or s 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 ly 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 blem even worse is an upsurge in sextortion assistance companies which charge thousands of dollars for their help in stopping and removing the photos and s from appearing online
According to the FBI these companies vide 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
MORE FOR YOU The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a free service for minors entitled Take It Down, which has been apved 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 nology to that used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to remove s 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 fit from sextortion
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) nology to take the faces and images of people in photographs and s and put them into realistic appearing pornographic s has been with us since 2017 although until recently it had been primarily used to create deepfake pornographic s using the faces of famous actresses such as Gal Gadot, Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson
Recently, however, the nology has been used by criminals for purposes of sextortion
The FBI has issued a warning 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 vided by the sextortion victim
The FBI advises parents to tell their children to be very careful as to what they online
Social media accounts which are open to everyone vide predators and scammers with much information that the scammers can use to lure people into scams
Parents should discuss the appriate 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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