When a teen-aged girl we know only as A.L. confided in Christopher Dekruif that her grandfather had molested her, he probably felt he had hit the jackpot. Abuse victims make easy targets. He had already persuaded A.L. to send him naked photos. Now, he had the leverage to force a bargain straight out of Hell.
Send me photos your grandfather performing oral sex on you, he demanded, or I’ll share your naked photos with the world, according a plea agreement entered last week by Dekruif. When that worked, he took it a step further, and demanded live video of the sex. On February 19, 2014, A.L. set up a webcam in her Michigan home and let Dekruif watch from his sickened perch in northern New Jersey. So he kept going. Next was a demand for a photo of a young relative, a 2-year-old boy, touching her breast. She accommodated that, too,
Dekruif, now 28, is a monster of nearly unspeakable deeds, but his tool of cruelty is in your hands right now. His method has become disturbingly popular. And if you don’t think you or a loved one could be a victim, you are disturbingly naive.
Such is the power of online sexual bribery. The crime is sometimes called “sextortion,” though that name is far too gentile. Barb Sluppick has run a support group called RomanceScams.org for nearly a decade, where she counsels online lovers who’ve been scammed in various ways. She tells me that blackmail based on the threat of nude picture distribution is soaring. Why? It works, and there are plenty of adult sites to post pictures and videos online for other peoples viewing pleasure, such as TubeV Sex and other adult sites on the web.
“I usually get the victims hysterical saying they are being blackmailed. And the victims are (both) male and female,” Sluppick says. Both adults and children.
The technique is powerful. Some details are provided below only to demonstrate how powerful. Feel free to skip this paragraph if you’d prefer.
A.L. wasn’t the only victim. Dekruif’s technique worked on several other women. He tricked 15-year-old girl to share a nude photo for an art class, then coerced her to send 1,000 photos and videos of herself naked, with another female, performing various sex acts. He then threatened to share the photos with her school unless she met him in person and had sex with him. A.J., a 16-year-old in Colorado, was coerced to commit bestiality, including placing a knife in her vagina, while he watched online video of the act. Dekruif created up a fake identity, and pretending to be a stranger, used naked photos to coerce her into inserting various objects into her vagina and send him pictures. K.D. was 15. D.R. was 18. The rest of the stories are the same. Get a picture, use blackmail to get hundreds more, or worse, from a terrified teenage girl.
Dekruif pled guilty to these crimes last week in a Flint, Michigan federal court. He will be sentenced in September and is facing as least 35 years in jail.
Sluppick frets his crimes, while hard to read about, are too easy to forget.
“It is amazing how widespread these scams are. It is still one of the most under reported scams, which of course helps it to spread,” she says. “You see when one of these stories comes out people are shocked and they think that something like that would never happen to them or their children. What should serve as a warning is often lost because although disturbing, they do not relate to it.”
The crime is global. Austrian police recently issued a warning about it. There, the victims are often teen-aged boys, who are shown stolen videos of a woman undressed and tricked into exchanging similar videos of themselves. In 2013, a 17-year-old killed himself by jumping off a bridge after a cybercriminal demanded payment and threatened to share sensitive webcam video.
Both kids and adults fall for Internet-based sexual blackmail, says Sluppick. The pattern is nearly always the same.
“It is all about the relationship,” she says. “You know, if you love me and we can not be together yet, you will do this for me. Then they will get the victim on webcam to disrobe and sometimes to perform sexual acts. Of course the scammers webcam does not work, so they can only view the victim. You would be surprised at the people who do this, because they think that it is something private and special that they are doing for the person they love.
“What they do not know is that the scammer is capturing this private performance on camera. When the scam is over and they have gotten everything they possibly can from the victim, then it turns to blackmail. At that point the scammer is usually friends with their friends on Facebook, knows where they work, their address and all that good stuff. So they threaten to send the video to work, to family, to friends, if the victim does not pay them. We get lots of people coming to us frantic because they do not know what to do.”
Teenagers sext. A fantastic story in The Atlantic last fall delved deep into the complex issue in a reasonable, realistic way. There’s plenty of ways to look at it. But parents and kids alike need to realize the permanence of bits and bytes, and the power of naked pictures as the doorway to a hideous crime. That’s how sexting becomes rape.
“I understand when someone gets into one of these situations, that the fear of being found out will escalate them into doing more in order to keep their dirty little secret. I can imagine for little girls how intimidating this can be. I have dealt with grown men and women that have been scammed into exposing themselves and performing sexually on webcam, under the ruse of love and many of them have a hard time handling it,” Sluppick says.
In truth, the pictures aren’t the problem. The secrecy is. Kids who are in a little trouble make things much worse when they believe they have nowhere to turn to get out of trouble. Fear of exposure has much less power over kids who know where to turn for advice.
That’s equally true for adults. Sluppick’s advice to adult victims is surprisingly simple, born from practical experience.
“We advise that they do not pay the blackmailer because once you do it never stops. We advise them to block the scammer from contacting them and to advise family and friends that this is a bad person and could possibly send them a virus so they should not open anything that is sent to them from the scammer. This usually works because when they get no response from the victim they eventually move on. We have not heard of a scammer posting the pictures if they were not paid because this is all about the money. The power here is in the threat and if they release the pictures they have nothing to bargain with.”
One victim Sluppick recently helped agreed to chat with me anonymously. He told me the advice worked. The sextorionist had threatened to release a video to his friends and parents.
“She keep on asking money for 2 weeks,” he said. When he didn’t respond, “after the two weeks, she just stopped messaging me.”
Adult sextortionists and child predators have different motivations. An ex-boyfriend out for spite has a far different goal than a Nigerian trying to make a quick buck. There is no such thing as simple advice to anyone in the midst of a horrifying exploitation. Professional help — both psychological and legal — are necessary. As is a lot of empathy, both for victims, and for your own good.
Here’s what you need to understand about sextortion.
*Panic-stricken kids and adults, fearing a loss of their most personal secrets, can be talked into doing nearly anything. Shame might be the most powerful tool in the world.
*To fight shame, be the person that someone can always talk to — a friend, a child — about anything going on in their lives. Anything. Without judging.
*Know the signs of sexual abuse. The U.S. Department of Justice has a helpful summary here. They include being overly secretive about a new, older friend; sudden mood swings; and exhibiting unexpected adult-like behaviors or language
Most of all, it’s important to know that these crimes can and do happen to people who thought they’d never be victims. Sluppick sees it every day.
Barb Sluppick can be reached at http://www.romancescams.org
Sign up for Bob Sullivan’s free email newsletter.
Be the first to comment