LAUDERHILL, FLA. (WSVN) - Broward County Public Schools and the Broward Sheriff’s Office are spreading awareness to a crime that targets teenagers.
On Friday, Superintendent Peter Licata and Sheriff Gregory Tony discussed a new campaign aimed at combating sextortion.
Sextortion is a form of blackmail where a suspect threatens to distribute a victim’s sexual content if their demands are not met.
“Sextortion is more of a threat to our students and to our school population in general then what we’re dealing with in terms of violence,” Tony said.
In the past, sextortion mostly target young women, but, according to officials, the crime has elevated to financial sextortion and the victims are now mostly young men.
To combat these crimes, BCPS and BSO are teaming up to warn teenagers and parents to be vigilant.
“The message out to everybody, make them aware so that our kids, when they are online, they think before they send, they think before twice if I’m talking to a girl or am I talking to someone overseas who’s going to try and extort me,” said BSO Sgt. Thomas McInerney, a commander in the South Florida Internet Crimes Against Children task force.
One victim of sextortion was 17-year-old Jordan DeMay.
DeMay was a popular teenager who received a message on Instagram and thought it was a girl named Dani Roberts. Who he was really texting, police said, were Nigerian men.
DeMay sent the men an explicit photo and they then threatened to send the photo to everyone on his contact list unless he sent them $1,000.
After the men demanded money, DeMay committed suicide hours later. He even warned the suspects, which they responded “Goodbye. Enjoy your miserable life.”
“A young male was being extorted and decided to take his own life because he felt trapped, and sadly enough, in some of the cases, you can read them, I mean the person was being extorted at 6 p.m., and by the next morning, he took his own life,” McInerney said.
DeMay is not alone when it comes to these types of crimes.
“Mostly, males are targeted right now in the middle school and early high school years,” Licata said. “It’s a life changing event. They don’t understand.”
“The typical pattern that takes place when we’re looking at sextortion is we have individuals on the other side of the internet who are pretending to be something that they’re not,” Tony said. “They solicit these photographs from kids, and if kids get into this exchange element thinking it’s nothing more than innocence or playful behavior amongst two teenagers, and then we come to discover that often times it’s not even a teenager who’s on the other side of this thing in terms of taking these photos and blackmailing.”
BSO and the district are encouraging students to say something and to show their parents any messages they’ve received.
Some other tips that officials are telling students and parents are to not pay any ransom money and to immediately block the suspect. Parents, especially, are being urged to monitor their children’s online interactions.
“I want you to think of this as preying on children just the way someone doing something wrong at the park or any of that, it’s the same mentality,” Licata said. “It’s sick, it’s evil and we have to protect our children.”
The BSO receives five cases of sextortion every week.
The new campaign will also include posters that will be placed in bathrooms at middle schools and high schools across the district. The posters will have a QR code that students can scan that will give them more information on how to stay safe.
Officials are also warning teenagers not to delete any messages they might receive because those could help prosecutors.
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