Sextortion is a serious crime. Its victims sometimes kill themselves. There's been a number of cases where young men who fell for this and then were blackmailed, killed themselves. These criminal rinks run out of some African, Asian, etc. countries.
The scam is an attractive woman befriending a man on social media, winning his trust (and lust), engaging him in a video sexual exchange, and then extorting him for money in exchange of not sharing the damaging video they made from the victim. Many men who fall for this scam and are so stupid to actually pay to these criminals, because if you pay they want more. Several sextortion gangs have been busted, latest (2021) being in India where there's a big sextortion mafia.
I was contacted by one such criminal. "She" purported to be a 23 year old supermarket worker in Helsinki (but her English typing sounded like a Nigerian man's). "She" picked the wrong target because I got her account closed down!
Also on Facebook I regularly get friend requests from fake accounts with are supposed to be attractive and suck in men into becoming friends and then directing them to sex websites or other scams. I used to report them and had many of their accounts shut down -- but these days I just block them (not time to even report them because there are too many and criminal gangs are sitting there all day making fake accounts).
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Instagram or Facebook or Skype – they usually start by liking your posts, sending you a friend request or they start following you or they send a message Hello and want to engage in a conversation and know more about you blah blah.
One contacted me today. I said where you are. “She” wrote something that sounded like a way a man speaks from a certain country I won’t mention here. “She” said she is a caregiver… “precisely” in Houston blah blah… and it’s 5 in the morning in Texas! I chedk her profile – she had a few posts that were suspicious. Further digging: people who liked her posts were the same people – one was a “woman” with sexy pictures and one an African man smoking. And the pictures were suspicious, the profile was suspicious. The way “she” talked was suspicious. Timing was suspicious. Opening line was a dead giveaway. So I blocked “her” (probably him, as part of scam network probably engaged in sextortion).
UPDATE 2022
A 17-year-old boy died by suicide hours after being scammed. The FBI says it's part of a troubling increase in 'sextortion' cases.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/20/us/ryan-last-suicide-sextortion-california/index.html
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FBI Launches Sextortion Awareness Campaign in Schools
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/stop-sextortion-youth-face-risk-online-090319
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