According to the police, the suspects operate from abroad and extort up to thousands of euros from the victims. Especially youthful men have been selected as victims.
Cases of blackmail have come to the attention of the police since last April. Jenni Gästgivar
The Helsinki police have recently received many reports of cases where victims are asked to take photos without clothes. After that, money is extorted from the victims.
Young men are often chosen as victims, the police say. Even thousands of euros have been extorted from them.
According to the police release, it is an old phenomenon that has been reactivated. Cases have come to the attention of the police since at least mid-April. The crimes in the cases are extortion or attempted extortion.
Young men chosen as victims
The suspects have found the victim on social media. Jakub Porzycki
According to the police, the suspects find the victims on social media, such as Facebook or a dating app.
At some point, the conversation usually moves to, for example, the Snapchat application or the video service Skype. There, the suspect sends the interested party a nude photo that he claims is his own. The suspect also asks the person concerned to put an intimate shot.
– When the man has sent the picture, he is told to pay some amount. The suspect is told that without payment the picture will be spread to his social media contacts, the police say in the release.
The amounts extorted are usually hundreds of euros upwards. Blackmail messages don’t end with payment, but more requests come. In some cases, the suspect demands payment, for example, weekly or monthly.
Suspicions operate from abroad
According to the police, in one case too, well over 1,000 euros were extorted from the owner on two different occasions. The blackmail continued after the payments, but at this point the victim stopped paying and filed a criminal complaint.
In another case, an attempt was made to get more than 8,000 euros from the victim.
The suspects of nude photo extortion are foreigners and operate from abroad. It is difficult for the police to intervene in their activities.
– They are not afraid of being caught or giving their personal information, because they ask to put the money in, for example, the Paypal payment intermediary system or as gift cards. In other words, the interested party will get at least one person’s contact information from the suspect, says the head of the investigation, the crime commissioner Anssi Enqvist in the bulletin.
According to the police, it is also worth considering whether to respond to unexpected contacts from unknown persons and whether to send them pictures. If you are the target of blackmail, the police urges you to file a criminal report.