Kolkata(West Bengal): Cases of sextortion have risen in the recent past with several young boys and girls falling into the trap and becoming victims of this new form of cyber-crime.
Sextortion is a sort of honey trap in which miscreants extort money by framing victims after they gain their trust. School and college going students, and young adults often fall prey to such crimes. To increase awareness in this regard, Cyber expert and ethical hacker Mohammad Reza Ahmed said these crimes often take place via social media 'friendship' on Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
Talking to ETV Bharat, Ahmed said that in sextortion, a male or female member on the other end of the phone starts building the victim's trust and eventually begins making video calls. Then the man or woman on the opposite end sheds off his or her clothes to go completely nude and then takes screenshots before the victim gets a hunch of what is happening. "The blackmailing follows the obscene screenshots," he said.
Ahmed said that the first step in avoiding such traps is to avoid video calls with strangers. Moreover, it is not allowed to send personal pictures to a partner or a close person using social media. In case, if someone falls into the trap of such cybercriminals, they must seek police help immediately and not fall prey or tolerate abuse.
Sextortion refers to a form of blackmail in which sexual information or images are used to extort sexual favors from the victim. Social media and text messages are often the source of the sexual material and the threatened means of sharing it with others. An example of this type of sextortion is where people are extorted with a nude image of themselves they shared on the Internet through sexting. They are later coerced into performing sexual acts with the person doing the extorting or are coerced into posing or performing sexually on camera, thus producing hardcore pornography.
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