A Nigerian man, Olamide Shanu, will be arraigned in a court in the United Kingdom (UK) for allegedly threatening to publish compromising photos and videos of teenage boys.
The 33-year-old sextortion blackmailer may have earned as much as £2 million from his victims, according to the UK media.
Shanu is set to appear in court in London in May after an extradition request from the United States.
Reports revealed that Shanu allegedly posed online as a teenage girl, to try and persuade boys to send him sexually explicit material of themselves.
He would then threaten to send the material to the victims’ family, friends or even the media, if they refused to pay him whatever amount of money he demanded.
At least three UK schoolchildren have committed suicide as a result of being blackmailed over sexually compromising content.
One of the victims had set up a payment plan with Shanu, paying him £240 a week, until the blackmailer had received almost £8,000.
Daily Express reported that Shanu’s cryptocurrency account is believed to have received more than 6,000 payments over a three-year period, leading investigators to believe that the number of victims could be in the hundreds.
Recall that the Uk’s National Crime Agency published a worrisome announcement last week, claiming that children were being targeted in sexual extortion scams.
The NCA said the number of cases involving children has skyrocketed in the last two years, to 890 in 2022.
There has been more than one high-profile case of a child in the UK taking their own life after being blackmailed.
Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane in Scotland, died in December 2023 after being blackmailed by an actor or actors with possible links to Nigeria.
In a similar version, Dinal De Alwis, also 16, took his own life after a blackmailer threatened to post nude photos of the teenager all over social media if he failed to pay up.
Dinal attended £48,000-a-year Whitgift School in Croydon, south London, and was a talented rugby and football player. He hoped to study at Cambridge after getting straight A’s in all his GCSEs.
The boy took his own life in October 2022, a matter of days after returning from a family trip to Mallorca during autumn half-term.
He left his home at 2 am and died around an hour later, as the reports believed the sextortion blackmailer who threatened him was from Nigeria.
Olamide Shanu, a Nigerian national, is accused of playing a role in an international blackmailing scam.
He was apprehended and arrested by police in Surrey at the end of 2023, and is set to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on May 28.
The alleged extorter is also wanted in the United States on charges which include conspiracy to cyberstalk, interstate communications with intent to commit extortion and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The US Secret Service has claimed that Shanu and other actors used false online profiles with pictures of attractive women to lure young boys into sharing explicit images of themselves.
The victims were threatened and blackmailed into making payments either through cryptocurrency or using gift cards.
