Perth Voice Interactive

A VOICE reader targeted by international scammers wants to warn others of a diabolical scheme preying on Perth men looking for a date.

The scheme extorts victims out of thousands of dollars by threatening to send intimate videos of them to their family and friends.

The blackmailers connect with their targets on online dating platforms and then set up a video call in hopes of gathering racy footage to use as extortion material. 

The scams have become increasingly common over the past few years, but what surprised our reader was the length of time the scammer committed to the ruse. 

After matching on the dating app Tinder, this scammer spent weeks texting with the target before asking for a video chat.

For “at least two weeks, if not more,” our reader Mark (not his real name) told us, which made him think it was unlikely a scammer would spend that much time on a target. 

The scammer was in the Philippines but Tinder allows people to search for dates in distant places. She came up with a cover story that she worked at a Perth hotel and was in the Philippines for a holiday until February.

Then this week she asked for a video chat via Instagram, and things quickly heated up.

Such steamy video calls are pretty common among young daters: About 50 per cent of generation Y and generation Z have sent a nude image of themselves or disrobed during a video chat, according to a 2023 study published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour.

“It’s pretty normal,” our gen-Z source said, “for me and my generation, this is pretty common,” and this had followed a pretty typical flirty trajectory.

Shortly after the call started the woman exposed her breasts, and asked the target to show himself.

The heat of the moment lowered our source’s guard enough to heed her request.

“I see breasts, my normal reaction is: F*** yeah,” Mark says. “So I obviously go to whip out my appendage and, you know, give it a few one-two-threes.” 

And then the woman asked him to show his face again. Shortly after he did, she hung up.

“A few minutes go past, and she sends me a screen recording of literally what I was just doing.”

“And then she sends me a screenshot of all my contacts,” including parents, friends and family, whose accounts were found on social media.

“And then she’s like: Send me $10,000, or I send it.

“This all happens at like 10pm and I’m freaking out. And the other thing is I didn’t want to tell anyone obviously, because like I’m ashamed that I was in this position in the first place, like a f***ing idiot.”

They bargained down to $1,000. Mark first attempted to send the payment via PayPal, but the platform refused to let the payment go through. The transfer eventually worked via the international transfer service Remitly, sending the money to a bank account in the Philippines. 

But it wasn’t enough: almost immediately, the scammer asked for more money, now wanting $4,000 to delete the video. 

Mark says that’s when he realised they could just keep asking for more, and he got angry.

While stalling the blackmailer with a few invectives, he set all his social media accounts to private, and then blocked the scam accounts. 

He reported the encounter to Remitly and to the police via the federal ReportCyber website, providing the scammer’s phone number, name and the bank account details.

The police contacted Mark the next day, and he says “they figured out who they were”. The initial PayPal transfer failing made the scammers desperate enough to send their bank account number. Police are also able to create a “hash”, a unique code related to the video, that can be put in databases to prevent the video being uploaded to popular porn or social media sites. 

Because Mark reported the crime quickly to Remitly, the company was able to cancel the payment before it was finalised and the $1000 was returned to his account.

Mark says the police “were actually really good. They’re just like: Yeah, you’re not alone, there’s heaps of people this happens to, but it’s really good that you’re coming forward and telling us about it.

“So many people are ashamed, which I totally get.”

But Mark was more angry than ashamed, and he says “I’m pretty happy that I spoke out, because obviously you could tell that they’d done it to a lot of people,” given how practiced the scammers seemed. 

“So who knows how much money they’ve taken from other people?”

by DAVID BELL