Ronan Hughes was just like any other teenager in Ireland.
He was popular at school, a keen Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) player and an altar boy at his local church. But his normal life fell apart after a chance encounter with ‘Emily Magee’, a friend he’d made on Facebook. He sent Emily, who he believed to be a fellow teenager, intimate photos.
But Ronan wasn’t messaging a teenage girl, he was in fact talking to 31-year-old Iulian Enache, the ringleader of a twisted sextortion gang based in Timisoara, Romania. Enache had groomed the schoolboy, asked for intimate photos, then demanded a ransom of £2,600 when he revealed his true identity as a criminal. Ronan pleaded ‘but I’m only 17, please, I’m begging you, don’t’ to which the blackmailer cruelly replied ‘That’s not my problem. Foolishness has a price. And you’ll pay.’
Ronan, with his parents at his side, visited a local police station to report the blackmail plot. But nothing was done and, three days later, Enache shared Ronan’s nudes with the 17-year-old’s Facebook friends. Distraught, the teenager took his own life in the hours which followed. His body was found by his father in a field near the family home in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
‘He did not take his own life,’ Father Benny Fee, a parish priest, said at the boy’s funeral. ‘His life was taken by these faceless people who put the child into a burning building that he felt he could not escape.’
Daniel Perry, a 17-year-old from Dunfermline; Dinal De Alwis, a 16-year-old from South London and Murray Downey, a 16-year-old from Dunblane are other young boys who have died by suicide after horrific abuse from sextortion gangs in recent years.
‘After a child is tricked into losing control of an image of themselves, it can become a scary situation very quickly,’ Richard Collard, head of child safety online policy at NSPCC, tells Metro. He’s head of child safety online policy at NSPCC, the children’s safety charity which runs Childline.
‘A child can be genuinely terrified when they call Childline and unable to see a route out of this situation,’ Richard explains. ‘Even if the victim says “I don’t have any money,” the perpetrator can start to ask for personal information, like bank cards, passport details to try to force a transaction through another route.
‘And if a child shares money the abuser doesn’t necessarily delete the messages. The threats just ramp up another level.’
Youngsters are ensnared by gangs through platforms such as Instagram, Skype or Snapchat. While poor grammar or strange turns of phrase might have been useful red flags in the past, AI and Chat GPT means criminal adults can ‘sound’ like a child to increasingly alarming degrees.
In statistics published this spring, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) revealed that teenage boys are deliberately targeted by sextortion gangs, as this demographic appeared in 91% of their reports. Gangs often target vulnerable boys who are coming to terms with their sexuality.
This was the case for Thomas*, from Norfolk, whose online ‘friend’ ruined his life.
He battled feelings of loneliness and isolation as he was brought up in a rural village, seeking solace online. Aged 14, he met a boy on the social media site ‘Mylol’ and quickly bonded with the user over video games and films.
‘It was an absolute relief to have someone to talk to,’ Thomas recalls. ‘Things escalated when he started to move the friendship towards a romantic relationship. A lot of the conversation became about homosexuality and trying to convince me that I liked him in that way. I couldn’t separate my feelings of whether it was friendship or something more and it was very confusing.’
After a month of chatting, the new ‘friend’ asked for naked photos.
Thomas adds: ‘After about a month, the pressure started to build of him trying to “prove” I was gay. That’s when he started sending explicit pictures and pressuring me to send images to him. I did send him pictures, but didn’t like it. I knew I had to tell him I couldn’t do it anymore, which is when it turned nasty, and the language was quite abusive.’
Thomas was told his explicit images would be sent to family and friends unless he sent over money. The abuser would pop up on social media during the night and bombard the 14-year-old with messages. Thomas, exhausted, would fall asleep in lessons at school as he was so worn out by the ordeal and the feeling of ‘constant fear’ about if his nudes were leaked.
Feeling like he was living ‘two lives’, Thomas called Childline for advice. He spoke to a confidential advisor twice a week and managed to take back control of his life. Aged 16, he went to college for a ‘fresh start’ and he now has a new job, a new life, in Essex – hundreds of miles away from his childhood bedroom where he battled his online abuser from. He adds: ‘You never think it is going to be you who gets trapped in a situation like this, but it could be.’
In Thomas’ case, and in many others, the scammer escaped justice because sextortion gangs are often located outside the UK, in countries like the Ivory Coast, Nigeria or the Philippines, meaning police here can only do so much to investigate.
Experts have also noted the use of AI is creating a ‘dystopian’ future for sextortion. Analysts at the IWF assessed 375 reports over a 12-month period, 70 of which were found to contain criminal AI-generated images of the sexual abuse of children. Horrific footage which contained elements of bestiality was also recorded.
‘Generative AI technology is evolving at such a pace that the ability for offenders to now produce, at will, graphic videos showing the sexual abuse of children is quite frightening’, explains Susie Hargreaves OBE, CEO at IWF. ‘Without proper controls, generative AI tools provide a playground for online predators to realise their most perverse and sickening fantasies.
‘The right decisions made now – by government, the tech industry and civil society – to ensure that the safety of children is a priority in the design of AI tools could stave off the devastating impact that misuse of this technology will have on global child protection.’
Sextortion criminals investigated by the IWF, in a report released on July 23, openly discussed and shared advice on how to use generative AI technology to develop child sexual abuse imagery. Step-by-step direction was shared by gangs on how to make ‘child porn’ and ‘fine-tune’ requests.
Kate Worthington, Senior Helpline Practitioner at the Revenge Porn Helpline which supports victims of intimate image abuse, says charities fear a ‘tidal wave’ of serious cases bolstered by AI or Chat GPT.
She tells Metro: ‘The fall-out of the pandemic, with people becoming more trusting online, is opening up space for these criminal gangs who work to prey on people’s vulnerabilities. I think AI is going to be the 2.0 of sextortion. Criminals will be able to create deep fakes and won’t need to go through the rigour of the grooming process.’
Revenge Porn Helpline often helps adults who have been paying sextortion gangs for years as they have been too ashamed to seek help. Some pay via cash while, in the past, Bitcoin was the currency routinely requested by scammers.
Kate adds: ‘These scammers are clever and unfortunately are very good at what they do. They might use multiple phones to message you and, all of a sudden, it might feel like you’re in some sort of film with everything going wrong so quickly.
‘They’ll target several people at once using social media and dating apps. They’ll be quite flirty, say the right things, give them attention and when the conversation reaches a certain point, they’ll ask for sexual images outright or they’ll invite you to a video platform and ask you to masturbate or show private parts of your body.
‘The moment that sexual content is obtained, that’s when they start blackmailing you.’
The online Report Remove service, run jointly by Childline and the IWF since 2021, is today a saving grace for children targeted by sextortion gangs. It allows under 18s to report sexual images or videos of themselves which they feel have been shared unwisely and see the files removed from the internet.
It’s a service Thomas wishes had existed when he was young. He was lucky to escape his sextortion ordeal with his life, when so many other victims aren’t as fortunate. But he still lives with the trauma.
If an unknown message pops up at work, Thomas sometimes avoids opening it due to an overwhelming feeling of dread. But he’s willing to share his story in a bid to encourage other young men to seek help – before it’s too late.
Thomas adds: ‘I want to get to a point where it doesn’t feel like something I have to hide in my life or forever be tormented by. It is in my past and I want to do something positive with my experience to help others.’
Where to find help after a sextortion scam
Report Remove, set up by Childline in conjunction with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and Yoti, is set up to help young people under 18 in the UK to confidentially report sexual images and videos of themselves and remove them from the internet.
The Revenge Porn Helpline was established in 2015 alongside the legislation which made it an offence to share intimate images or videos of someone, either on or offline, without their consent. The Helpline, for anyone over 18, is run by a small team of passionate and motivated individuals who are here and ready to help.
*name changed for privacy
Help is on hand: Call 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org if you have been impacted by any points raised in this article.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Kirsten.Robertson@metro.co.uk
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