JEDDAH: MOHANNAD SHARAWI ARABNEWS
Tuesday 4 June 2013

We have heard of cases of girls being blackmailed through social media or other cyber networks. However, there has been little discussion in the media of females who use the same means to harass men to extort money.

With the spread of mass media, particularly social networking sites and the speedy tempo of technological development in smart devices, it has become very easy to reach people living in distant lands.

Arab News decided to deliberate on this very sensitive issue, which has not been touched upon by most local media sources. It spoke with male victims, experts and social specialists to highlight the different aspects of this phenomenon.

Majed Bahabri, an activist and blogger on social networking pages, told Arab News that the many cases of males being blackmailed are for the purpose of extorting money. Cyberspace or smartphone racketeering cases are usually committed by girls and sometimes by males posing as girls. Unfortunately, extortion through blackmail has become very widespread and looming on social networks in different forms, causing anxiety among youth,” Bahabri said.

Khalid Al-Saadi, an IT manager at a local company, commented that networking sites are open to all and that there is no way to impose restrictions or control users.

He said that users and surfers are of different ages and come from various cultural backgrounds and nationalities. “In fact, naïve young males or even men might fall victim to such scams. I would say that even rich people, businessmen, media figures and entrepreneurs are a likely target for some racketeers, usually girls from outside the Kingdom.
As such, it is important to raise awareness among our kids and the public at large about the dangers of cyber-blackmail.”

Fahad, 36, narrates a real story of one of his closest friends, a famous media personality and columnist at an Arabic newspaper. Fahad’s friend has recently been duped through the well-known social network site, Skype.

The columnist received a private message in his Facebook inbox from an unknown female account. The Arabic message read: “I am a regular reader of your daily column. I’m 24, from Morocco and very interested in chatting with you over Skype.”
The young man didn’t realize that this was a trap for a much more dangerous game of money extortion. No sooner had the girl posted the FB message than he logged onto Skype and began chatting with her.

He spent around a week chatting and video chatting with her. Fahad’s friend admitted that the girl was very beautiful and within a week he was enamored by her daily flow of romantic chatter.

After she had shown him her face and exposed parts of her body amid indecent clothing, the girl asked the man to do the same over video chat.

Overwhelmed by temptation, the man did as she had asked.

Soon after, the video chatting stopped and a private message was sent to the man’s inbox telling him that the girl would post the taped video of this recent video chat if he did not send an instant remittance of around $ 3000 within two days.

read more HERE: