2022: Teen Sextortion Case Study – How we Located the Person Sexually Extorting a Teenager on Snapchat
The Brief
We were contacted by a worried father, whose teenage daughter was the victim of sextortion on social media. She developed an online relationship with someone on Snapchat, who she believed to be of the same age. After a while, the sextortionist demanded pictures from her and gave her deadlines to check in with him. He threatened to send the pictures to her friends if she didn’t supply more and did exactly what he asked. When she refused, he sent pictures of her to some of her friends on Instagram and made more threats.
Her father was already in touch with the New York State Police but contacted us to help identify the antagonist responsible for the sextortion and tormenting of his daughter.
Objective
Our primary objective was to identify the sextortionist who caused our client’s family so much hardship.
Outcome
We engaged with the sextortionist on Instagram through our client’s daughter’s profile, as well as the profile of a friend of hers who gave us permission to use to her account during the investigation.
Even though the sextortionist was careful and used a VPN, we were able to identify him by capturing his location and various digital artifacts through social engineering and utilizing our proprietary software.
Through capturing his IP address, device details, and more, we were able to ghostwrite a subpoena for our client and law enforcement, to obtain customer information related to that IP address.