Three years ago, 17-year-old Gavin Guffey was playing video games with his friends on a summer night, when he got a message from who he thought was a pretty girl on Instagram. Not even two hours later, Gavin took his own life.
Gavin is one of dozens of teen boys who was tragically victimized in a sexual extortion scheme targeting minors – a growing trend the FBI is warning parents about.
Sexual extortion, also known as sextortion, occurs when an offender coerces or tricks a minor into sending them sexually explicit images or video footage, and then threatens to release that material unless the minor produces additional explicit content. Or, in the case of financially-motivated sextortion, the offender will demand payment instead of more sexual content.
Brandon Guffey, a Republican lawmaker in South Carolina and Gavin’s father, spoke to The Daily Wire about this son’s case and how he’s working to protect other minors and hold predators and social media companies accountable.
“We as parents can lock our doors to protect our kids, but now so much of their life is online and we don’t realize the people who are contacting our kids on the other side,” Guffey said.
Reports of sextortion cases of minors are rising each year. The FBI saw a 20% increase in reports of financially motivated sextortion in just one six-month period in 2023. From October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations received more than 13,000 reports of such online activity targeting minors. There were about 12,600 victims, mostly boys, and at least 20 suicides.
A more recent number, according to USA Today report, found that sextortion cases have been tied to at least 30 suicides of teen boys since 2021. And that number is likely a low estimate, since some families might not even be aware their child was a victim of sextortion, due to the online nature of the crime.
Additionally, the CyberTipline, which is run by the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), received nearly 190,000 reports of Online Enticement of Children for Sexual Acts, which includes sextortion. That number has quadrupled since 2021, when the Tipline received around 44,000 reports.
Tammy Lee is the CEO of Our Rescue, a nonprofit focused on ending child exploitation that partners with law enforcement in all 50 states. She told The Daily Wire that threats online need to be taken seriously by parents.
“We really believe that every parent has to take this to be one of the most serious threats against their children of our time, because predators are everywhere,” she said.
Talks about “stranger danger” with children must evolve to include discussions about online safety, Lee noted.
“We used to teach our kids to watch out for strangers, or people in white vans,” Lee said. “Now, we have to worry about who is coming into our child’s bedroom through their gaming console, or through their iPhone, or their iPad, because these predators lurk online looking for kids that they can extort.”
Instagram and Snapchat, according to NCMEC, are the two most-used apps for these crimes. Messages can disappear on both apps, which might lead to victims putting their guard down before sending over explicit images used against them.
In financially-motivated sextortion cases, young males are most often targeted. In fact, one report found that 90% of all financially-motivated sexual extortion victims were males between the ages of 14 and 17.
According to parents of numerous victims, minors will be messaged by an account they think is being operated by a female of similar age, who might tell them they have mutual friends. The conversation then turns sexual, and soon after the victim sends over explicit material, the blackmail begins.
A memo from the FBI’s Sacramento Field Office says that financially-motivated sextortion offenders are often foreigners, primarily from west African countries like Nigeria and Ivory Coast, or Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines. Lee told The Daily Wire that the nonprofit, which often works with law enforcement, is seeing the same pattern.
“Our officers that we partner with in digital forensics are definitely seeing a spike in these crimes originating from some of the African countries,” Lee said. “They’ll post and pretend to be a teenage girl or a teenage boy asking for explicit images. Once those images are exchanged then the predator from one of these African nations will go in and threaten them.”
After losing his son in 2022, Guffey was sworn in as a state representative in South Carolina and became a fierce advocate in the fight against sextortion. Just a year after his son’s death, Guffey got “Gavin’s Law” signed into law.
“My son Gavin was contacted by a predator through Instagram messaging,” Guffey told The Daily Wire. “He jumped off the video game with friends to have a chat with this female, or so he thought. They began to share images, and within 1 hour and 40 minutes, Gavin took his life.”
“I’d never heard of what sextortion was, or had a clue of what it was,” Guffey said.
After his son passed, Guffey said he and his family were contacted by the scammers for more money, and he was even taunted about Gavin committing suicide.
“They began to extort Gavin’s 16-year-old brother, a 14-year-old cousin, and then, trying to extort me as well, fully aware that Gavin had taken his life,” he said. “They sent a message to me and said, ‘Did I tell you your son begged for his life?’”
State Rep. Brandon Guffey of Rock Hill stands outside the federal courthouse in Columbia on Monday with a photo of his son, Gavin Guffey // The State via Getty Images
In January, the Nigerian scammer who blackmailed Guffey’s son was extradited to the United States and is facing life in prison.
Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal has been charged with child exploitation resulting in death, the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material, coercion and enticement of a minor, cyberstalking resulting in death, interstate threats with intent to extort, and aiding/abetting, according to the Department of Justice. Additionally, Lawal is accused of targeting the victim’s family in the stalking and extortion charges.
“Often with these extortion schemes, you have money launderers within the United States that are transferring funds in order to get them overseas, and then typically overseas, in Gavin’s case, they come out of Logos, Nigeria,” Guffey explained. “There is a well-known group called the Yahoo Boys that are doing a lot of these extortion schemes.”
The “Yahoo Boys” will “‘bomb’ high schools, youth sports teams and universities with fake accounts, using advanced social engineering tactics to coerce their victims into a compromising situation,” according to Infosecurity Magazine.
The group gets its name from the web service provider Yahoo, and the criminals are tied to past “Nigerian Prince” scams before shifting to elderly fraud, fake job scams, and sextortion, the magazine reports.
There’s also been a rise in sextortion acts from a group called 764. Members here in the United States and abroad are forcing minors and other vulnerable people to commit disturbing sex-related crimes or self-harm. In these cases, predators are motivated by sexual gratification.
Ashley Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s St. Louis Field Office, discussed 764’s activities on FOX 2, earlier this month.
“People have been asked to engage in cruelty to animals, self mutilation of some sort,” she said. “Some cases we’ve had individuals ask children — if they knew they had a sibling — to film themselves sexually abusing their sibling.”
Moreover, artificial intelligence is widening the net of sextortion victims, Lee told The Daily Wire.
“More and more of these sex predators are going online and they’re becoming more sophisticated in the ways that they go after young people, minors who they’re trying to exploit,” she said. “What’s brand new that we’re seeing now is AI — AI is becoming a very emerging threat for sextortion where these predators can take an image of a fully clothed child and turn it into child sexual abuse material.”
Addressing teens who might find themselves swept up in a sexual extortion scam, Guffey urged young people to be brave and report such crimes.
“I tell them, number one, don’t send images to someone that you’ve never met before. I mean, you don’t want sending images, period,” he said. “But if you do, make sure that your face and your privates are not identifiable in the same picture as well. And if that does happen, don’t be scared. Be brave enough to go to your parents, to go to law enforcement to report this.”
“If you feel like you can just pay them and this’ll go away, they’re going to continue to go after not only you — ‘cause it will never stop once you pay them money, they’re going to continue to go after other teens and make them feel the same way that you feel right now,” Guffey continued. “So, it’s very important for us to report it so we can go after these criminals.”
In his son’s case, the scammers were asking for “a couple hundred” dollars, Guffey recalled.
“I think it was $25 [Gavin sent] over to them. But, of course, that’s never enough. The key to this is to ensure that you never send a penny.”
As for parents of potential victims, Guffey is preaching grace and understanding.
“I would say for parents, number one, I think often we as parents get very angry whenever our child makes a mistake, and we need to learn grace again,” he told The Daily Wire. “We can say, ‘don’t send pictures, don’t share pictures,’ but, nowadays you don’t even have to; it can be AI. And this is your reputation, and it’s getting spread throughout your entire community — it’s not one school where you get this name.”
“You need to be there to fight for your kid and make sure you have the conversation that regardless of what the situation is, make sure that they know that you will be there for them,” he continued. “I felt like I had that conversation and that connection with Gavin, however, this was just so much shame that he didn’t feel that he could come to me.”
Guffey is working with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R.) on the bipartisan Take it Down Act. The bill would require social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to remove any content that features explicit images or videos of minors, known as “child sexual abuse material,” or CSAM, or “revenge porn,” within 48 hours of the content being flagged.
On Tuesday, the Take it Down Act passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and has been championed by First Lady Melania Trump.
“This marks a significant step in our bipartisan efforts to safeguard our children from online threats,” Mrs. Trump said in a statement. “I urge Congress to swiftly pass this important legislation. Together, we can create a safer, brighter future for all Americans!”
Lee also encouraged parents to speak to their children about this issue. “The average parent only spends 46 minutes in a child’s lifetime talking about how to stay safe online,” she told The Daily Wire.
“This can be a very difficult topic for parents to want to talk about with their kids, but it is the next great safety factor that they have to bring up with their kids in order to keep them safe,” she added.
Since that conversation can be a challenge for some parents, on its website, Our Rescue offers a guide, called, Let’s Start Talking. The nonprofit also spends time in schools across the country with its law enforcement partners to encourage online safety, Lee said.
Outside of educating parents and children, Guffey wants social media companies to have protections stripped from them over their lack of action concerning CSAM material.
“I think the number one thing that we have to do is to remove Section 230, or revisit Section 230, which was written in 1996,” he told The Daily Wire. “It gives these companies — who are the richest companies since the inception of man — it absolves them from being sued. So we can sue them, but things get thrown out before discovery because they just say, ‘We’re not responsible for anything online because this is a public forum.’”
Guffrey is currently suing Meta, the parent company of Instagram, over his son’s death. “I filed a suit directly on my own, not demanding money, but demanding change.”
Addressing parents and children, Guffrey had a simple closing message: “Tomorrow needs you.”
“Tomorrow needs adults to stand up and fight to protect our children,” he said. “But tomorrow certainly needs the next generation. If we don’t have the next generation, then what are we fighting for?”
If you or someone you know thinks they’re a victim of sextortion, please call law enforcement. You can report it to the FBI by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI or visiting tips.fbi.gov.
