1128: Sextortion | Skeptical Sunday

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Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Today, we're going to be discussing a pretty gross topic, the sexual exploitation of adults and children. We wanted to put that up front because all kidding about triggering and stuff aside, we know that this is a very emotional topic for a lot of people.
And yes, it can trigger panic attacks and other emotional disturbances in people who are sensitive to that. So if you're one of those people who might find this difficult slash impossible to listen to or you got young ones around, maybe skip this episode for now.
All right. I got a really disturbing email a few days ago and it had me a little bit nervous.
It said that it had all kinds of evidence that I was a gross sexual pervert, guilty. Pictures of me rubbing one out, so to speak, even pictures of me and my wife in bed.
Now, that would be bad enough. But the email also said if I didn't fork over some serious cash in the form, of course, untraceable or actually super traceable Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
People think it's untraceable. It's the most traceable thing ever.
It's called the blockchain, folks. They were going to leak all that secret information.
They were going to make it public. Fortunately for me, I knew this was a scam because I'd heard all about these kinds of scams in the past.
Lots of people, of course, don't know any better. They're losing lots of money, not to mention a lot of sleep on these sextortion scams.
And in some cases, people might even be sexually exploited by their sextortionist. Worst of all, a lot of times sextortionists, which is a hard word to say for multiple reasons, are actually targeting kids.
And they're after something far more valuable than just money. So how do you keep yourself and your kids safe? And have we gone too far in our zeal to protect kids that we're actually harming them rather than helping them? Now, it's a dirty job, and it's a shame that anybody is doing it.
Here to help me keep everyone a little bit safer on the internet is writer and researcher Nick Pell. So Nick, have you ever seen these emails? I feel like they're super common these days.
Oh, yeah, I've gotten those. They're freaky.
No one wants to think about some weirdo watching you in your home, no matter what you're up to, no matter what you're doing. That's right.
Like sleeping with your wife, being with your girlfriend, that's obviously disturbing, but it's kind of disturbing no matter what is going on, right? I mean, even if you're just sitting there reading the New Testament, like I always do every weeknight, you don't want some creepy weirdo using your home electronics to spy on you. Correct.
But the good news is that they're almost certainly not spying on you. And you can just absolutely ignore these emails and go on about your life.

Great. All right.
Thanks for coming on Skeptical Sunday. I'll see you next time.
I wish it were that simple. Obviously, there's a lot more to this because the scams keep going.
So obviously it's working a little bit, at least on a few people. There's more to it, but the main point is that no, this person does not have pictures of you having sex, pranking your hog, screencaps of whatever weird junk you were watching on Pornhub at 3 a.m.
after a night at the bar. Absolutely.
The best thing you can do is just completely ignore the email. If you're bored and you're so inclined, the FBI has a spot on their website where you can report them.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, right.
The FBI are about as useless as tits on a bull unless you took an unsupervised tour of the Capitol Rotunda on January 6th, 2021, or you're a 14-year-old being edgy in a Discord channel. They're not going to do anything.
Yeah, it seems like just file this web form and we'll call you. It's like, we want some people to have a place to report things so they feel better.
But that's all that is. I would not have very high confidence in the FBI finding whatever dude in Kerblechistan who wrote the specific email telling you how to send him five Bitcoin to get your naughty pictures taken off of some hard drive.
Now it's probably like half a Bitcoin because it's up so high, but nobody can afford five Bitcoin. It just it doesn't seem like they're going to go for these criminals at all.
Don't worry. It'll be back down to 20 grand by the time this podcast comes out.
Good. I'm going to buy more.
Jim Cramer said it's going to the moon, everybody. It's over.
Ultimately though, these scammers, they're just playing a numbers game. If you send out an email saying, Hey man, I have a video of you beating your meat, send me $10,000 or or I'm sending it to everyone you work with, to 10 million people, and 0.01% of them respond.
That's 1,000 people, and you just made a cool 10 million bucks. Is that math correct? I genuinely have no idea, and I'm not getting out my phone.
I am a degenerate crypto gambler, and if there's one thing that I know how to do, it's multiply by factors of 10. Yes.
So regardless, your point is that's a lot of money for not a lot of time, effort or risk on the part of the scammer. Right.
They just shoot this stuff out there. And if one person responds, they've made a good hourly rate messing around with this crap.
Yeah. And I sort of doubt they're getting anywhere near 10 million dollars every time they send out a batch of these emails.
In my business, I write spam emails where I sell your parents and your grandparents Donald Trump tchotchkes a 5% response rate. Oh my God, I would sell my children into slavery for that level of conversion.
So I really doubt these guys are converting even at 0.01% with their weird malformed broken English. But drop a couple zeros off the end of that 10 million.
It's still a good paycheck for a day's work. Sure, especially if you live in a developing country where that money goes really far.
And of course, you have zero morals about how you make your money in the first place. I suppose that's true.
But how many people are actually falling for this? I wonder, are there hard statistics on how often this is actually working?

There aren't. Not really about this type of sextortion, which is just a glorified phishing

scam. Playing the numbers game.
They have your info. They're trying to get you to click a link

or to send them money. It's not terribly sophisticated or even much of a problem,

except for the rare people who send them money. Weirdly, no one is really concerned with this

Thank you. not terribly sophisticated or even much of a problem except for the rare people who send them money.
Weirdly, no one is really concerned with this type of sextortion. No one really seems to care.
I think there's a couple pretty obvious reasons why and that the people who fall for this scam, this type of sextortion scam, they're not real eager to go report the crime because they maybe figured out that they got scammed. And as a guy who has been scammed, wait, did you pay a sextortionist? No, I sent Russian dudes like 10 grand for cryptocurrency miners.
Yeah, that must have stung a little bit. It does.
And I think it's worth taking some time to talk a little bit about how I felt afterward. Like it is so not about the money.
Losing the money sucks. Don't get me wrong.
$10,000 is $10,000, but it's so humiliating. You feel like some idiot boomer.
I was so mad at myself for being so stupid. And I was honestly more mad at myself, but I wasn't the scammers.
Yeah. Not that all boomers are idiots, but some boomers are and they fall for stuff like this.
And also millennials like you. So how do you know they were Russian? I'm a Gen Xer.
Okay, whatever. Close enough.
We're on the line. We're on the line, but I'm like, I'm like, I'm mad lazy and don't care about my work.
Fair. Oh, good.
That's always a good quality in someone who works for this show. How do you know the scammers were Russian? They're always Russian.
Okay. I can't really argue with that logic.
Okay. This is one of those, the views of Nick Pell are not endorsed by the Jordan Harbinger show.
Anyway, did you report that? I did the first time. What do you mean the first time? This happened more than once? This happened twice in one week.
Wow. Okay.
Definitely let's talk about how you feel about that because that's a kick in each nut. I hate talking about this.
So we can totally just move on now, but this was six months ago and it's still chaps my buns to think about it. Yeah.
And I'm not mad at the scammers. I'm mad at myself for falling for it.
Like the second dude, I sent him money like three times. So I get why people are not exactly rushing to fill out a report, especially given that the cops are going to do precisely nothing.
Yeah, that makes sense. I get the idea of not bothering to report something because it seems so futile.
What's the point? And the other thing is, if they get the victims once, there's a good chance they're going to get the victims again. I guess they don't generally ask for a ton of money.
It's probably something negligible, say 100 bucks, 500 bucks. But the thing with blackmail is, though, you can just keep going back to that as many times as you want.
Why is someone who's blackmailing you going to be honest with you about stopping blackmailing you once they have your 500 or your 100 bucks, wherever it is. Yeah, I get that.
Once you send somebody 500 bucks for this, the scammer is not like, oh, thanks, buddy. Guess I got to find a new victim and running away.
They're just going to keep juicing you until you give up or you run out of money or whatever, especially if they're basically safe and sound halfway around the world. And you've proven yourself to be a sucker who will send that money.
No offense to suckers. That's the long and the short of it.
There's no reason to report these crimes. And the people who get scammed once are probably getting scammed over and over again.
Like you said, it's a nice little payday if you have absolutely no conscience. It's a passive revenue stream for sociopaths.
So how can people be safe when it comes to sextortion scam emails? Don't send them money. Don't click links.
This is like basic internet hygiene. The end of the day, this is just a phishing attack.
They're just phishing. I'd wager that most of the people who get got by this are the ones who click links saying like, hey, I put your nude pictures here, come check it out.
The scammers are absolutely counting on there being a non-trivial number of people who just cannot resist clicking links that are like, hey man, your nudes are here. They know there's a certain type of person who has to click that link, who just cannot help themselves.
Anything else? I got some phishing emails today asking for my crypto passphrases to verify my account, of course. Is there anything else? MetaMask support, man.
They always want your seed phrase. That's right.
They always want the secret phrase that you're not supposed to give to anyone. Is there anything else that people can do? I mean, I know, yeah, don't click links, don't send these guys money, but okay, what else? You should keep up to date on cybersecurity and scams in general, because guess what? If you're in the age demographic for this show, you are growing into an old and out of touch person who has no idea how technology works, and you are a prime target for a scam.
So I would suggest that you put Krebs on security on your radar. That's a good one.
For those unaware, this is a security website that monitors a lot of emerging exploits and scams, and it's good to keep on your radar so that you can keep yourself and your family safe. And I want to admit right now, I've fallen for weird internet scams, not ones that require you to be greedy or say that they have nude pictures of me.
Just some of this stuff is incredibly complex. We joke about, oh, you're a boomer and you're out of touch.
Anybody, even the most savvy folks can fall for this stuff. I know scam researchers that have fallen for scams.
So you just got to have your wits about it. Yeah, it's crazy.
Yeah, Crabs is a good site. They tend to veer away from the total batshit insanity and paranoia, which that's not productive or helpful either.
For sure. The last thing that anyone getting into this needs to do is become super paranoid and have their life grind to a halt.
That's one of the unfortunate side effects of getting scammed. Some people get a little bit too conservative.
You have to be mindful. For example, there's a new addition to these phishing email sextortion scams where they send pictures of your house.
Oh, I have seen this. So I got a scam email without photos and I shared it on an episode of this show on Feedback Friday.
And a bunch of listeners were like, oh, I think I got the same email, but it had photos of the outside of their home. Because again, we're back to being freaked out about the very idea that somebody can see where you live.
If they've sent me photos of me in my house, now I'm scared. But this is like a photo of my garage.
Okay. That's not too scary.
Yeah. It's the most generic low res photo of the outside of your house.
That's on Zillow. Yes, exactly.
How many times is the exterior of your house appear on the internet for anyone who has your address defined, which is a really good segue into the question that I'm sure a lot of people who get these have, which is like, how do they know who I am? How do they know my name? A lot of times they might have your address in it or like your phone number, your email, something like that. So how do they have this stuff? Yeah, in my case, maybe the fine pictures of my house, but they had my email, they had my full name and they had part of my phone number.
But I have to say the part of my phone number was this is on one hand disconcerting. But on the other hand, I was like, oh, you couldn't get my whole phone number.
Like what kind of amateur nonsense is this? We're not going to tell you your whole phone number for your privacy in this scam email. No, you just don't have it, you Muppets.
Yeah, they're just buying data files off of, you know, dark, shadowy corners of the Internet where people traffic in personal data, your name and email, probably your address, maybe your social security number, your credit card numbers. They may be in there, too.
What's not in the file of data that they bought off the dark web about you? Yeah. Anything remotely incriminating at all? Absolutely correct.
This is not how blackmailers work. Blackmailers show you the proof they have something they're going to blackmail you with.
They don't say, hey, man, I got naked pictures of you and here's the proof. It's your front door and the last four digits of your phone number.
Yeah, the front door taken from a moving vehicle and the last four digits of your phone number. Exactly.
Yeah, I got the Google Maps car to take a picture of your front door driving by, and I got the last four digits of your phone number and, you know, your first pet's name, dude.

And that means I have pictures of your wang. You've seen spy movies.
There's a scene where the KGB agent hands over the Manoa envelope with the evidence. And if they don't show the evidence, it's because there isn't any.
It doesn't exist. He sits in the car and he opens up the Manoa envelope and there's black and white photos of you in there kissing somebody.
But it's a total misunderstanding because that person kissed you and blah, blah, blah. That's every movie, right? That's every scene in that movie.
So I feel like there's this big panic going around. Actually, that was maybe just the Tetris movie.
But that was the last time I saw that scene. There's a Tetris movie? Yeah.
Oh, it's actually pretty good. It's the story of how Tetris got to the United States out of the Soviet Union.
There's like KGB intrigue, which is probably hyperbolic nonsense for the movie only. But they show how the guy kept going back and forth and how they invented these different parts.
It's actually shockingly good for a movie that's about an 80s video game. I really enjoyed it.
That's our unsolicited recommendation here on Skeptical Sunday. Watch the Tetris movie.
So I feel like there's this big panic going around about all of this sextortion, the scams, they've got my nudes. I'm kind of at a loss for why because so far it sounds like what you've got is dark web data brokers selling people's information, some extremely gullible people falling for it.
Hey! Yes, but like you said, this is not the scam that you fell for. So look, people fall for it.
That sucks. You have sympathy for people who fall for scams, but I don't know whose lives are being ruined financially or otherwise.
So where is the panic coming from and why is this in the media other than like slow news day okay that's a good question and i've got a really big reveal for you that you weren't aware of when you sent me out to research this for you lay it on us chief people are freaking out about this because there's a variant of the sextortion scheme that is not a glorified phishing scam. It's a means to sexually exploit children.
Okay. So this was a thing that I hadn't really given a lot of thought to when I first asked you to start researching this for me, like you said.
So yuck. I don't know how to react to that.
That's gross. It's gross.
But it's the same basic premise. Someone says they have pictures of you.
They don't want to get out, except in the case of the children getting targeted, they usually do have the incriminating material. You know what you won't have to sexually extort a child in order to afford? The fine products and services that support this show.
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How are people getting that incriminating material, sexually incriminating whatever material of minors then? If they're not getting all the stuff I make off the dark web, catfishing them. Okay.
So let me explain this. For those who don't know, catfishing is when you pretend to be someone online that you're not for the sake of seducing or befriending or scamming someone.
So you might pretend that you're some hot, babelicious 25-year-old. Yes, I said babelicious.
When in reality, you're just a 44-year-old dude with a podcast. And it was funny at the time, when I was in high school, I was on AOL, right? You'd be DMing or whatever, sending instant messages to girls your age that you could find in your area.
Sometimes there was one dude who was always sending his photo out, and I was like, wow, this guy's a model. It was a photo of a a dude who was a model.
Clearly he was young, but it was like a surf model or something. So my friend Jessica was really interested in this guy.
And she's like, will you meet me with him though? Because I don't know him. So it was near my work, this movie theater.
And she's like, okay, he's here. If I'm not back and like come back in 10 minutes, tell you it's safe, whatever.
I can't remember exactly what it was. She runs back in and she's like, there's an old guy out there.
He said, oh, sorry, I'm not Drew. And then he offered me 20 bucks to watch him jerk off in the car.
That's what happened. So this dude basically was tricking high school age girls to come into the parking structure and then being like, hey, sorry, I duped you, but I'll give you 20 bucks if you watch me rub one out.
And I'm like, we laughed about it. But like 2020 hindsight, we should absolutely have gone to the police because that guy was a sex offender.
I mean, it sounds like kind of a typical day in 1995. Yeah, you're right.
Yeah, it's gross. So this is one of those things like people think that I'm insane when I say that there's never been a safer time to be a kid, maybe there's people out there who like are aware that this is true.

But most people say, oh, kids can't play outside anymore because, you know, it's too dangerous or whatever else. There's literally never been a safer time to be a child.

Fact.

This is not a matter of opinion.

This is a stone cold fact. There is mountains of data.
There has never been a safer time to be a kid. Johnny Gosch, Adam Walsh, these kids' disappearances and deaths completely changed the culture around child abduction in this country.
So for anybody who needs a quick refresher, those were two super high profile child abductions that took place.

I think both were in the 80s. They're both in the early 80s.
I think Adam Walsh was like 81 and Johnny Gosch was 83. So everyone our age remembers those because they were all over the TV and parents essentially use these as not parables because they were true, but warning signs.
They would use it to warn us about stranger danger. And John Walsh, Adam's dad, the name might sound familiar because he started, I think, America's Most Wanted in part because of this.
I don't know the whole backstory. His whole career is based on the fact that his son was murdered.
He was young. Yeah.
He was like my kid's age. Yeah.
But Adam Walsh and Johnny Gosch, and there's a third one whose name I don't remember. There's like three that are always kind of brought up together.
They completely changed everything about how we as a society in America, at least, respond to child abduction. And the stats on this are wild.
Kids literally used to just get snatched out of the mall, out of the park. Hey, little girl, help me find my dog, that kind of stuff.
This is a totally different world in the 70s and early 80s in terms of child safety. I remember we had in the county where I grew up in Michigan, we had the Oakland County child killer.
I mean, that's just scary even saying it out loud again. And I'm pretty sure they caught that guy.
But you're right. There was a lot of just somebody went missing and it wasn't because their stepdad or their parents took them.
It was a total stranger and it was really freaking scary. Yeah.
And in the older child abduction cases from the battle days, most of those kids were murdered. I'm not trying to be gross or grim, but you can sell a baby.
Somebody will buy it. but a kid is a witness.
A kid is not a commodity. It's a witness.
And if you're abducting a kid, it's also so weird because I just watched this thing last night about there was always like, oh, I'm eight years old. And apparently I was kidnapped and I don't remember it.
No one's kidnapping eight year olds for like illegal trafficking, not in the West, not in the first world. So if you're abducting a kid off the street from a playground, wherever, you're abducting some strange kid, you're not doing that for wholesome purposes.
You are absolutely getting rid of the only witness when you're done doing whatever it is that you're doing to them. It's why Adam Wallstein, almost certainly.

I don't know that they ever figured out who got him.

That's what you do with a kid when you're done with some kid that you grab.

Yeah, it's gross, but that's it.

That's it right there.

Yeah, it's absolutely true that if you commit some horrific sex crime

against a child that you've abducted,

you're not going to leave them alive to tell the tale.

Yuck. That makes sense.
Yeah. And so the thing is, too, this is so absurdly rare these days.
Like almost all child abductions now are noncustodial parents. Almost all of them.
Kids do not just get grabbed off playgrounds anymore. It is a man bites dog story when they do.
It didn't even used to be a story. You say noncustustodial parents.
This is like, I get a divorce, my wife ends up with the kids, and I'm like, I don't like that outcome. So I just go and grab the kids when they're at school.
And I say, I've got the kids now and I fly to Saudi Arabia. And I don't even think most, well, good luck as somebody who is divorced and has a kid.
Yeah. Good luck being a single man, taking a kid out of the country without a notarized paper saying that you're allowed to do it.
And also there's things like the hate convention on child abduction. You just you can't do that.
You're not going to grab a kid and take it to France and get away with it. Interpol is going to grab you.
They're going to send the kid back. Zero evidence here.
Just a hunch. I think that in almost all of these dad took the kid across state lines or whatever, dad kidnapped the kid or mom kidnapped the kid or whatever it is.
I think that probably the overwhelming majority of these are miscommunications or parents had an informal agreement and one party got pissed at the other party and they decided to weaponize the cops against the other parent. You think people are doing that in large numbers? I'm not getting into the details based on what happened with my divorce and my custody case.
I have zero doubt that people use their kids in this way. I have zero doubt whatsoever.
I believe that more than I believe dads are just going, oh yeah, I'm going to kidnap my kid. I'm going to get away with it.
Yeah, that's an interesting point. Yeah, I hadn't thought about this.
Okay, so coming back to the topic at hand, so it's never been safer to be a kid. What's with the child sextortion thing? So the giant screaming asterisk next to the statement has never been a safer time to be a child is the caveat that you have to be extremely careful about what your kids are doing online.
The data on this is also very one-sided and clear. Children are safer than they have ever been unless you include the things that can happen to them on the internet.
And then it's game on. Kids don't just get grabbed in broad daylight anymore.
It's super safe to be a kid outside now, but yeah. But on the internet, it's a whole other ballgame.
And I'm aware that one factor in making the world safer is the helicopter parenting. If you're always hovering over your kid, no one's going to take them.
There used to be ads on television at 10 o'clock reminding parents that they had children. 10 o'clock, do you know where your kids are? That's funny.
I thought that was a joke. That's hilarious.
Do you know where your kids are? Like, I guess I should go outside and see if they're still alive. That's funny.
Yeah. This was the reality of childhood pre Columbine.
It's a cliche. This is like one of those other things, like how I know I'm Gen X and not a millennial.
Never read a Goosebumps book. I've never played Pogs.
I've never played Pokemon. My parents had absolutely no idea where I was between the hours of 2 p.m.
and 8 p.m. any given day.
That's true. No idea where I was.
If I came home too late, they were like, where did you go? Oh, I biked all the way down to three towns over and went to an arcade where drug dealers hang out, and they were like, oh, okay. Try to come home a little bit earlier because it's dark and cars can't see you.
Nobody was like, you're going to get abducted. No.
Yeah, me and my friends walk three towns away, share a single pack of cigarettes, like passing around a joint, like walking train tracks and dodging trains and whatever else. It was the magical time to be alive.
A miracle that we're still here. It really is.
We've been 30 since we were 12 years old. That's right.
The cliche is that you had to be home when the streetlights were on or whatever. I just basically came and went as I pleased.
I got into a lot of trouble and a lot of extremely inappropriate sex and drug shenanigans. Sure, sounds like that.
At a very young age. And why do kids not do that anymore? Because when younger boomers and Gen Xers had kids, they were like, my kid's not just going to roam the streets like being a test guinea pig for a new type of weed for a high school kid.
I'm going to know where they are. So I think that we maybe have gone a little too far in the other direction with the helicopter parenting.
And I'm probably guilty of that. But the helicopter parenting is one of many factors of why kids are safer.
Like you watch the more they're safer. All right.
So what are some of the other reasons that kids are safer now besides helicopter, however you parents? One of the biggest is just awareness, lack of tolerance for child danger. I always make the joke that the phrase, you know, a kid might get hurt is like basically how you get any law passed in this country.
We have completely bubble wrapped the world for better or for worse. I think probably both upside and downside to both of it.
More than that, though, it's just the awareness that I talked about. Kids get told to avoid strangers, which is kind of stupid because they're more likely to get abused by a teacher, a parent, a family friend, a priest, a trusted adult.
My church had a whole thing about don't get molested by a priest. And I wanted my kid to go to that because I wanted him to get it from like the church, not for moral reasons, because I wanted it in the context of priest abuse.
I wanted him to be aware of priest abuse. I'm surprised the church had, I guess I shouldn't be.
Yeah, they're supposed to. Yeah, it's court mandated.
They're not doing it because they're nice guys. They're doing it because the court made them as part of their massive settlement.
But your kids are more likely to get molested by a public school teacher, which is another thing I say that nobody believes, but is absolutely true. Then you have other things like Code Adam, a program at Walmart and Old Navy where if a kid is missing, they basically put the whole store on lockdown until they find them.
Meanwhile, that kid is just hiding in the middle of a clothing rack. Remember doing that when you were a kid?

Yeah, it was fun as hell.

I can feel the 80s carpet on my hands

just talking about,

but my mom used to go ballistic with fear.

She'd be vibrating by the time I came out.

My poor mom,

I probably took a decade off of her life

doing stupid crap like that in the 80s.

And it sounds stupid to lock the store down like that,

but this is named after Adam Walsh because it literally would have saved his life. That code Adam would have saved Adam Walsh's life.
I'm also old enough to remember child safety was like, hey, Nick, make sure you're not alone with Mr. Johnson, okay? And then 20 years later, you find out that Mr.
Johnson is like a serial child molester. Jesus.
And everybody knows it. And they're just like, stay away from him.
No one calls the cops,

nothing. They're just like, yeah, Mr.
Johnson, he likes to touch kids. Stay away from him.
Now he's on the registry. But back then, the registry was like, your parents told you, like, don't talk to this guy.
Yeah. Kids are usually safe at school or church in a way that they just weren't in the 1980s.
They are not safe online. What did the statistics say about kids and online safety? Because I'm guessing that even online exploitation and abuse is rare, just in sort of absolute terms.
I think it's more common that people think, like in 2022, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 80,000 reports of enticement. 80,000.
Do you think they're all legitimate? All those reports are somebody called

to report something. I think it's difficult to say, honestly.
Do I think that there were 80,000 attempts to entice a child that stalled out because they picked the wrong kid? Yeah, I believe that. That sounds credible to me.
Do I think that the people attempting to entice those kids are going to keep on going until they either end up in prison or more likely they hit pay dirt and they find a kid they can manipulate into real off of the internet abuse yes and also like dude like so many girls i'm friends with and girls i've dated were like oh man like when i was 13 on aol i had some like 50 year old guy hit on me and I just rung him along because I thought it was funny.

But like it was really creepy and messed up.

So, yeah, like that kind of tracks for me.

But that's the thing is like 80,000.

The only reason that those 80,000 are like, who cares?

The kids are blowing it out of proportion is because nothing happened.

It was savvy enough to know.

Yeah, OK, I'm going to mess around with grandpa here for like 20 minutes and then I'm going to get bored and I'm going to go watch something on YouTube. But eventually they're going to find a kid.
Yeah, that's scary. One survey showed 40% of kids surveyed said that they thought someone had attempted to groom them online at some point.
That's one where I feel like, nah, we're maybe, kids maybe being a little dramatic there. But the only reason I'm able to say that is because the kid's smart enough to not get sucked in by their clumsy attempt at grooming them.
I get how kids could overreact or misunderstand something, especially when they're just self-reporting in a poll or whatever. Yeah.
But the thing is, from a parent's point of view, there's no downside to treating these kids' perceptions as real. Your kids do not need to be talking to or interacting with adults online.
And this is especially true when you're talking about private messages. Look, I agree with that.
Grownups with good intentions are not sliding into your kids' DMs because they want to talk about something in good faith. And this is the thing, like, there's a case to be made.
Stranger danger comes with negative consequences. But in terms of the internet and online, I just don't think there's any scenario where your kids can be too cautious.
I don't want to detour too much here, but what are the negative consequences of kids being too cautious around strangers? There was this lost 11-year-old Boy Scout who evaded his rescuers because he thought they were trying to kidnap him. It's an extreme example, but it's there.
The bigger issue, it's safety in general, where parents are arrested because their eight-year-olds are at the park without supervision. Does that really happen, though? Or is that just some old person like, we used to drink from the garden hose.
It sounds like one of those talking points. We can link you in the show notes.
And in fact, I texted you that story. Remember about the woman who's getting charged for letting her 10 year old walk to the park alone? That one was that's one still baffling.
The kid in Georgia who walked to the park alone. And it was like a mile away.
And the mom is she went to jail or at least there's a mugshot. Yeah.
Crazy. Yeah.
Parents have been arrested for letting their children play outside. Other parents have been investigated by Child Protective Services.
I'm giving my finger to the microphone right now. Noted.
Okay. For letting children play in their yard.
Again, read the show notes if you don't believe me. America has gone insane when it comes to child safety because child abduction, true child abduction is extremely rare.
Most missing kids are runaways, which isn't like, oh, well, yeah, let them go. It's just like they ran away, maybe because they're involved in drugs, maybe because they're involved in other crimes, maybe because they have abusive homes, maybe because they're just tempestuous little shits.
They weren't snatched by the Oakland County child killer. Exactly.
People focus on all of this stuff like, oh, yeah, it's 1974. And my kid's going to get grabbed out of the playground by a man in a trench coat and are just like oblivious to the very real dangers of giving your kid a device that keeps them wired to an algorithm

scientifically designed to exploit their most secret vulnerabilities and anxieties

while simultaneously giving perverts access to their daily lives. And that's where the real

danger lies. That's right, folks.
Save that sextortion, Bitcoin, so you can support the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.
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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Okay, so this seems like a good segue back into the sextortion of kids topics.
So walk us through what it's like when the sextortion scheme drops on a kid. I was super shocked to find out that kids as young as nine report flirting with total strangers on the internet.
Jeez. And I was curiosity about the opposite sex at the age of nine, but I did not have internet actually.
I think that's the key difference. A lot of kids are just not getting the level of supervision that they need when they're staring at the box and the parents are sitting next to them reading.
They have no idea what's going on. One in three minors say they've met some of their closest friends online and one in seven say that they've told something to an online friend that they've never told anybody else.
Okay. Look, maybe some of that's a recipe for disaster.
Your kid giving away secrets to somebody online and they don't really know that person or they barely know that person or they think they know that person, but it's a different person. Yes, absolutely.
Which is a great way to start talking about the model of a predator and what they're going to do. So first, they're going to set up a profile.
It could be a boy profile to target boys. Let's talk about Pokemon or soccer or whatever gets in the kid's good graces.
Could be a girl or boy that targets the opposite sex based on attraction. The point is the predator sets up a profile posing as a child because the kid is going to talk to another kid before they're going to talk to an adult.
The kid's not going to want to talk to somebody who's 58 years old and into reruns of Barney Miller or something. Yeah, that was a TV show that 58-year-olds watched in the 70s for anybody who...
I don't know how you know that, but I believe you. It's constantly in my home growing up.
So you've got this profile on TikTok or whatever it is a kid you use, and you just start fishing. And it's very common for predators to have a type, but they may also not just be predators in that they're looking for a kid to personally abuse.
They could be groomers who are looking to sexually exploit kids for financial gain. A lot of show fans know I used to help the police catch pedos on America, AOL, way back in the 90s.
And I will spare everyone that story. But the Internet and predators are kind of an iconic duo.
Keep walking us through how these creepy weirdos target kids. So what's the groomer thing that you mentioned? You want to set up an account that's attractive to the kid.
And you do a little social engineering and you look into what their interests are. And kids are so notoriously bad about blasting out where they go, things they like doing, interests, kind of girls they like, whatever.
There's no no filter on these kids they've blasted all these details and that makes it very easy for the predator not to go like oh Bobby gets out of school at 2 o'clock and he goes here and I'm just going to go grab him but oh Bobby's into the Legend of Zelda and so if I talk to him enough about the Legend of Zelda I'll earn his trust trust and I'll be relatable. But how does it move from like, oh, you like Fortnite too, to give me money? It actually would be great if it stopped to give me money, but the process is going to be basically all the same.
So you're like, you're a fake girl online flirting with some 14 year old boy and you send him a naked picture. How do you have a naked picture of a 14 year old girl in this scenario? Or is it, I don't maybe want to know the answer to that.
So it could be a picture of a grown-up. It could be some gross and illegal picture that they picked up somewhere else.
BAI could be a lot of different things. From there, it's basically the same old, I'll show you mine if you show me yours kind of thing.
Teenagers and adolescent boys are pretty notoriously ruled by their hormones. And so getting them with a couple of nudie photos, probably not the hardest thing in the world to do.
Yeah, I would 100% have been hooked by this when I was in high school. And I don't know how much I've changed.
I got to be honest. When I was a teenager, I had zero self-control.
Now I have a layer of self-control over kind of the same brain, unfortunately. I was fortunate in that I was like, I like girls, man, but I was just, I had zero confidence that any girl was ever going to be into me, which I look back and I like look at pictures of myself when I was 15.
I was like, damn kid, you were money. What were you thinking? But I was just like, eh, girls are never going to like me.
I'm into like hardcore records and skateboards and being angry. Oh, yeah.
I don't know that I would have fallen for this because that would have just been like, eh, girls, like boring. Now you're like the same as every band idol that girls love and have posters of on their wall.
But okay. Yeah.
Jeez. Fish in a barrel.
Yeah, it's fish in a barrel with a boy. Everybody listening knows what we're talking about here.
Boys are fish in a barrel with the newie pics, and the girls is probably going to use for finesse, emotional attachment, manipulation. But with a boy, I can see, hey, here's some boobs.
Now show me your wiener kit. Right, okay.
And then think about it from the kid's perspective. Like, a picture of you in your underwear could be mortifying to you as a teenager.
Yeah, man. Adolescents are so uncomfortable in their own skin, as evidenced by your previous story.
Once the predator has that first picture, that's all the leverage they need. You don't need a bank of 20 to get a kid to feel vulnerable and overexposed.
Exactly. Because, you know, the point of the kid and he sends a picture of himself as boxes or whatever, there's no turning back after that.
Everything is going to go back to what the predator wants. Maybe they want money.
Maybe they want more incriminating pictures of the kid so that they can take the kid further down the road of sexual abuse and exploitation. Meet up with me, and I'll delete these pictures or whatever.
He's not going to do that. The point is, once they have something that the kid doesn't want people seeing, it's over.
Is the predator really going to do anything though? I mean, you mentioned the whole blasting the picture out to the entire school. What are the chances that a perp is actually going to do that? I would wager that the chances are pretty small, though not entirely non-existent, but probably not too much more than non-existent.
But perception is reality. If the kid thinks that the perp is going to send their shirtless or naked or whatever picture out to the school, that's all the predator needs because it's the fear of what might happen that's going to motivate the actions of the part of the victim.
And that's true of adults as well as kids. The difference is that the adults are way more likely to be like,

you know,

go. motivate the actions of the part of the victim.
And that's true of adults as well as kids. The difference is that the adults are way more likely to be like, yo, go away.
I'm going to call the cops. The kids are terrified.
They don't want to bring their parents into it. And that's the whole point.
You are freaking out all the parents listening to this show right now. Good.
They should be freaked out. I would rather have every parent listening to this episode be freaked out than a single one of their kids become victims to one of these kinds of scams, especially because this is not some destroy your internet router and burn your MacBook.
That's not the solution to this. So what can people do to educate their kids about this? Because now that we're all terrified, what do we do with our kids? They're not going to believe anything we tell them, theoretically.
Yeah, I think the main thing is people need to be very clear with their kids about safety on the internet. And I'm sure that you're going to get a lot of eye rolls and, oh, God, mom, whatever.
I'm not going to get exploited online. I remember being a teenager very well.
I have no idea. My kid is seven years old.
I'm still in my period of parenting where my kid thinks his father is the coolest human being alive. Okay.
Yeah. I am the coolest human being alive.
What if the kid has already been a victim of a scam? What do you do then? Because I've heard people commit suicide over stuff like this. It's horrible.
I've actually seen cases. I think it was in Michigan where these two kids that were scamming other kids and sextorting them.
I think they were like Nigerian immigrants or something like that. They went to prison for at least a decade and change because they were actually encouraging their victims to kill themselves.
And one of the kids actually did that. So it's not just, oh, they got the kids nudes and then the kid stole mom's credit card.
This can have just absolutely horrifically terrible consequences. Yeah, this is a rabbit hole that if you get down it deep enough, there'll be blackmailing the kids to cut themselves on video.
They'll be blackmailing the kids to starve themselves. There was one where they were blackmailing the kids to take estradiol.
It's just gross. I have a friend who runs a soup kitchen in Connecticut, and he gets a lot of people who have to do court-mandated public service, and he gets pedophiles.
That's a weird crowd to work with, man. Offenders.
Like babies, like toddlers. And when you see them, there's something very off about them.
And he says in the instances where he has heard them talk about their offenses, that the consistent theme is that the thing that they enjoyed was hurting a child. That tracks with things I've learned on this show.
Most pedophiles never offend because they know it's terrible and they can't imagine doing it to someone else. The offenders, this freaked me out.
We had a whole episode about pedophilia, actually, which is quite enlightening and gross. Look for it in the back catalog.
One of the things I found just absolutely fascinating about this whole subject was, like I said, if you're a pedophile, you're probably not an offender statistically because you know it's terrible. But the people who do offend are often not actually pedophiles.
They're not actually attracted to children. They just wanted to hurt someone and children are accessible and defenseless.
So a lot of people who are sex offenders against kids, they're not actually even really pedophiles. They're just sicko psychopaths that wanted to hurt somebody and children were an easy target, which is somehow even more screwed up.
These people are the worst. It's really not surprising me that the same types of people with the same like skill set or set of techniques or however you want to put it, used to exploit a child sexually are used by people who are just like, let's just get this kid to cut himself for my amusement.
Terrible. So yes, it's so gross.
It's so dangerous, which doesn't mean you have to burn every digital bridge in your house, but like treat it like parents treated a public park in 1987 after Johnny Goshen and Walsh. You got to be mindful.
You got to be careful. You got to communicate with your kids.
You got to tell your kids to have some stranger danger on the internet. What you need to communicate to them in the same conversation is that if they ever get into any kind of trouble online, that you are going to be there for them and that you are going to support them and that no, they're not going to be in trouble because some creepy weirdo coerced them or tricked them into sending dirty pictures of themselves.
You need to be very, very, very, very, very clear with that about if you think that this is happening to you, this is like you go to a party with your friends and the kid who drove you got drunk. Or you got drunk and you were driving.
Call me. I'll come pick you up.
That same type of conversation where it's like, think of it that way. Your 16-year-old drives his friends to a party and gets drunk.
You have to communicate to the kid like, I don't care. Call me because I'd rather have a drunk kid than a dead kid.
And it's the same thing. I don't care what some creepy weirdo on the internet got you to do.
It does not matter to me at all. I am here for you and I will get your back and we will stop it.
That's the thing that you need to communicate to them. I would also communicate to them the creepy weirdo could be another kid because kids sexually abuse other kids.
Kids manipulate, blackmail, sexually abuse other kids. And that's a thing that doesn't quite get enough attention.
I'm not really sure what you can do other than get out in front of it and communicate to them that the door is open. You don't blame them.
You're there to help them. That sort of thing.
Yeah, I can see how a lot of teenagers would just ignore the stuff about proper security, but then would eventually remember like, oh, yeah, dad said that if I ever got tricked into doing this, that it's not my fault and that he'd have my back. And it's embarrassing, but I remember him saying this and kind of have to get into that.
You have to have that little seed planted in their brain. Yeah.
And kids have a very poor sense of life's very real dangers. I would maybe also mention if you don't want to talk to me about it, talk to a teacher or counselor, all that kind of stuff.
I don't mean it as an afterthought, but the kids think probably correctly that you're going to get roped into it, even if they tell their pastor or their teacher or whatever.

But whatever.

They need to talk to somebody about it.

I thought I was going to live forever when I was about 15 years old.

I was pretty aware of my mortality at a young age, but it didn't stop me from doing dumb stuff.

Communicating to your kids that you absolutely don't care what they have done to get trapped into it, that's the important part. 64% of victims report that the threats get worse with greater compliance.
82% are too scared to seek help. And that's, I think, where you can really make the difference, I think.
Yeah, that's scary. 64% of victims report the threats get worse with

greater compliance. I think the thinking, too, is that it's probably not super hard to get kids to share images of themselves because it's so normal these days to sext your boyfriend or your girlfriend or even somebody that you're just flirting with these days on various social media apps.
I've seen stats about how pervasive this is. It's just a little scary.
The report that I read said that 6% of kids age 9 to 12 said what is euphemistically called self-generated child sexual abuse material, but which, you know, is a 50 cent word for nude selfies. Ages 9 to 12 have done this? 6%? Yeah, it's only 6%, but yeah, I agree.
That's nuts. 25% of the respondents of the survey viewed it as normal behavior.
That includes kids age 9 to 17, so who knows what the bell curve on that is. But as you say, it's normalized, and I'm not going to tell parents that, oh, just throw your hands up.
The world's going to hell and you can't do anything about it. It's going to send their nudie pictures to half the school.
And it's just what the kids are doing these days. I think that's just untrue.
I think parents have tons of influence over their kids, but good kids make mistakes. And even quote unquote, bad kids don't deserve to be targeted and exploited by adults because they've made one mistake or a hundred or 10,000.
For any kids listening to this who are currently being exploited in this way, you have to shut off this podcast right now and go talk to a trusted adult. Maybe you don't feel comfortable talking to your parents about what's happening.
So talk to a teacher, priest, neighbor, family, friend, literally any adult that you trust. I know a lot of kids listen to the show, as do a lot of older adults.
So it's just throwing that out there for anybody who's dealing with this or found this on Google

after they got sextorted. And this was the first page of Google or whatever.

You would love that kind of SEO engagement.

That's right. But yeah, I completely agree.
And if you're a grown up,

the weird Russian hacker does not have any pictures of whatever it is you do when you're

alone.

That's right. It's a Chinese hacker who has all the goods.
So put it back in your pants, your iPod, that is, and make sure you take note of what we discussed today. So while this is all pretty grim material, I actually really appreciate you, Nick, for digging through.
This is kind of a dirty one. So you educated us here, and I know you had to sift through all that, so I really, I do appreciate that.
Thanks, everyone, for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at Jordan Harbinger dot com.
Show notes at Jordan Harbinger dot com. Advertisers, deals, discounts and ways to support the show all at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash deals.
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Our advice and opinions are our own. And yes, I am a lawyer,

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Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love.
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show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.
You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Amanda Catarzi, who was raised in a cult and later sex and labor trafficked. The women were trained to be insanely submissive.
Like you could never say no to any man. And then the men were trained in a very military way.
These people are well-armed and well-trained. And it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the kingdom of God.
When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old, being courted by men twice my age, three times my age, to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous.
So I moved to California to go to school and I start training MMA. And my trafficker was there.
He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, you know, I like you and so now we're dating.
So this is my first adult relationship. He's twice my age at this point and then he would always take me up to his cabin on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody else.
No phone service, isolation, and it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could.
Oops, you accidentally got gang raped. That was very common of going to go train and then all of a sudden, now that you've fought 12 rounds, now you're going to be raped.
A girl ran a red light and T-boned my truck. So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, hey, I almost just died in a car accident.
He said, is your face fucked up? And I'm like, no. He said, well, you're still fuckable then.
Something isn't right here. This isn't who I want to be.
This isn't what I want. And it was like I was coming out of water.
I had this moment of clarity and I knew something wasn't right.

And I knew this wasn't what I wanted.

And I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation because I knew I'd get sucked back in.

To hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.