- Justice Nyako warns that sextortion is wrecking lives
The parents of a British teenager who took his own life after falling victim to sextortion, Mark and Ros Dowey, have appealed to perpetrators to stop the act.
Murray, their 16-year-old son, committed suicide after he was tricked by scammers from Nigeria who posed as a girl, into sending compromising pictures of himself. Authorities in Nigeria were involved in the investigation, but Ros, his mother, said the process was “painfully slow.”
Mark told the BBC his son was “a really lovely kid” and that he and his wife had no idea anything was wrong. “He went up to his room, and he was absolutely fine. And you know, we found him dead the next morning,” he said. Ros added: “We had no chance to intervene, to notice there was something wrong and try and help and fix it.”
In a video message, the Doweys described the moments leading up to their son’s demise as a “cruel” crime by the perpetrators.
“You’re abusing children. You’ve ended Murray’s life,” they said. “How would they feel if it was their child or their little brother or their friend? I mean, it’s so cruel, and this is children, and it’s abuse. You’re terrorising people, children, for some money, and I don’t think in any society that is in any way acceptable.”
A sextortion scammer in Lagos told BBC News Investigations that the crime is like an “industry.” “I know that it’s bad, but I just call it survival of the fittest,” the scammer said on condition of anonymity. “It depends on the fish you catch. You might throw the hook in the sea. You might catch small fish or big fish.”
The Nigerian said he treats the issue like a game. However, according to the BBC, the scammer had a change of heart when he watched Ros and Mark’s recorded message. He said he was “almost crying” and felt “very bad.”
In September, a US court sentenced two Nigerian brothers who targeted a 17-year-old in a sext0rtion scam, to 17 years and six months in prison. Jordan DeMay killed himself less than six hours after he started talking to the brothers who pretended to be a girl his age and flirted with him on Instagram.
The prosecution was the first successful measure against sextortion in the US, where it is a rapidly growing cybercrime, often linked to Nigeria. Murray’s parents also blamed social media companies for not doing enough to protect children online.
Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram in July said it had removed 63,000 accounts in Nigeria linked to sextortion scams. Last month, Meta said it deleted another 1,600 groups linked to ‘Yahoo Boys’ from its platform.
In an interview last year with Law & Society Magazine in Abuja the President of the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), Hon. Justice Binta Nyako warned against the dangers of sextortion, charging persons in authority to carry out their roles without extorting sex from subordinates.
Explaining that sextortion is “when you use sex to extort favours” she further stated it is a continuous programme her association organizes for young people “and we started from secondary schools. It is when someone in authority demands sex for favour from subordinates. It happens in the judiciary, legislature, executive it happens everywhere.”
Nyako said “every opportunity I have, I talk to secondary school students about that. Imagine a scenario where a child comes home with the best result and you know she’s not that smart or comes home with a bad result and you know she’s not a dullard. This indicates the child might have been intimidated by a lecturer or senior student for sex for marks. It is a programme IAWJ does in conjunction with NAWJN. That is the National Association of Women Judges, Nigeria.
“The program came to us from Canada where you have immigration judges who extort sex from wives of immigrants for them to be given immigration status. The Chief Justice of Canada who was a woman brought this to our knowledge. In the UK traffic wardens have said to beautiful women ‘show me your breast and I will not give you a ticket.’ I have had an opportunity to speak with members of the National Assembly who attended one of our programmes and I told them the way politicians in Nigeria behave is not acceptable to women. Why do you call your meetings at 3 am?
“Every woman will be in her house with her husband and children at 3 am. Then they have what they call anointers in the political arena where they extort sex from women to give them tickets. We also have superiors in factories and elsewhere asking women for sex in exchange for time off or extra allowance.
“The one that touched most of us was what happened in Tanzania. In Tanzania it’s very bad. Oftentimes staff of court needed permission from their judges to do overtime so they can get paid extra allowance. A particular court staff was sick and a female judge asked why she’d been falling ill. It was then discovered she had HIV. How did she get HIV? It turned out she had been sleeping with a judge that had HIV. She had passed the HIV to her husband and family. The judge had also been sleeping with the house help in the house and his son had been sleeping with the house help. It was a whole family of about 10 or 11 that came down with HIV. Some of them passed on. It then became necessary for us to bring this to the fore.
“We can’t sweep everything under the table. We have to rise with one voice against it. I have spoken to judges of this court about it in our conferences. Every opportunity I’ve had, I speak about it. When my lord Justice Ogunwunmiju was NAWJN President, she made pamphlets sensitizing people about this matter.”
