Nigerian ‘sextortion blackmailer made £2m by threatening boys’
A suspected ‘sextortion’ blackmailer is believed to have made £2million by threatening to release explicit photos and videos of teenage boys.
Olamide Shanu is accused of posing as a girl online to persuade boys to send him compromising photos.
He allegedly threatened to send the images to his victims’ families, friends and the media if they did not pay him.
Shanu, 33, from nigeria, will appear in court in London later this month and is also facing an extradition request from the United States.
One of his alleged victims sent £240 a week until he had handed the blackmailer almost £8,000. Shanu’s cryptocurrency account is believed to have received more than 6,000 payments over three years, with the number of victims thought to be in the hundreds.
At least three British schoolchildren have killed themselves as a result of being blackmailed over explicit images. The national crime Agency last week said the number of cases involving young people had increased dramatically.
An inquest heard in February that privately- educated Dinal De Alwis, 16, from Sutton, south London, took his life in 2022 after a scammer threatened to send the boy’s nude photos to his online followers if he did not send them money. The Times reported that the threat was also thought to have come from nigeria.
Shanu, who is accused of being involved in an international blackmail scam, was arrested in Surrey at the end of last year and is due to appear before Westminster magistrates on May 28.
He is wanted in the US on separate charges including conspiracy to cyberstalk, interstate communications with intent to commit extortion, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The US Secret Service has alleged that Shanu and other conspirators used fake and stolen online profiles with pictures of attractive women to target boys through instagram and other platforms.
Their payments were traced to Shanu’s account with Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange.
By the time the account was traced, it had been emptied of $2.6million (£2.1million) worth of Bitcoin.
‘He posed as a teenage girl’
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