Ben was 14 when he was blackmailed online into sending explicit pictures. He tried to take his own life. But, unlike some other victims of 'sextortion', he survived to tell a story every parent should read

Ben Wilde* was a popular and academic 14-year-old when he received a chatty Facebook message from a girl he'd never met, who claimed she was friends with someone on his school football team.

The pair ended up corresponding online about what Ben calls 'all the normal stuff'; family, school, friends.

Nothing seemed remotely out of the ordinary — until a few weeks later, when the 'girl' revealed she was, in fact, a grown man. Now armed with reams of personal information, he made threats against Ben's family unless he sent him a series of naked photos.

Terrified and vulnerable, Ben complied, only to find the blackmailer upping his demands, asking for the teenager to appear in sexually compromising poses on Skype before sending the videos and pictures to other men — who in turn bombarded Ben with more requests.

'Gifted' student Dinal De Alwis took his own life after being blackmailed with nude photos by a stranger on social media app Snapchat

The blackmailer told Ben that if he didn't continue, he would send all the videos to Ben's friends and tell them he was gay.

This unfolding horror went on for two years until, believing he'd never find a way out of this nightmare, Ben took an overdose in his bedroom one afternoon after school at the age of just 16. 'I didn't know who to tell or what to do. I'd got myself in too deep and I was so embarrassed. All I thought all the time was: 'When will this be over?' he recalls. 'I decided to try and end my life, so I didn't have to deal with what was happening.'

Thankfully, his mother came into the room and, on seeing the empty tablet boxes, rushed her son to hospital.

Now aged 22, Ben can still vividly recall the panic and shame he felt on discovering he was a victim of 'sextortion', the name given to a phenomenon in which ruthless criminal gangs — often from West Africa and South-East Asia — target young people online.

They lure them into an online 'friendship' via fake or hacked social media accounts and persuade them to share intimate photographs or footage.

They then reveal their true identity and threaten to release the images to loved ones unless the victim either continues to service their requests or sends money.

Sextortion is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that is rising exponentially, with the number of children targeted in the UK rocketing almost threefold in recent years.

Murray Dowey took his own life aged 16 in December last year after becoming victim to sextortion by a man posing as a teenage girl online

Ros and Mark Dowey's lives were torn apart when they lost their beloved son. 'We were six feet away when this was happening,' Ros says. 'He just needed to come through to our bedroom'

This year, the National Crime Agency revealed that the number of cases of child sexual exploitation reported by under-18s had risen from 243 in 2020 to 890 in 2022.

The spike has been almost exclusively driven by sextortion cases, with one of the most targeted groups being teenage boys aged from 14 to 18. Tragically, in recent years, at least three are known to have taken their own life after falling victim to ruthless online predators.

Such is the mounting level of risk that the National Crime Agency this week took the unprecedented step of issuing an alert to school teachers across Britain — at both primary and secondary level — to be on guard for children being targeted by 'extremely malicious' criminals who leave a devastating legacy.

'It's affected us terribly as a family,' Ben's father told the Mail.

'I'm constantly thinking about it, and what he did. You feel like you haven't done enough to protect your children, who are the world to you. You ask yourselves: "Why didn't we see it? Why didn't we notice?" There is always that "why?"' 

In the US, where more than a dozen boys have taken their own lives after being blackmailed over intimate images, the phenomenon has been described by the FBI's director Christopher Wray as nothing less than a 'global crisis' that 'demands everyone's attention'.

Ben is in no doubt about that sentiment. One of two brothers, he went from being a happy-go-lucky member of a loving family to panic-stricken and suicidal.

After his tormentor unveiled himself and began threatening to share the personal nature of their conversations to Ben's friends on Snapchat, he extracted endless compromising photographs and footage from the teenager, subsequently sending it to other men who also started sending their own demands.

'With the bigger demands came bigger threats,' says Ben, who says the messages left him in a state of abject terror.

At one point, the culprit told Ben he knew where his parents worked and would go there and kill them.

'The words he used were: "I'll destroy you",' Ben recalls. 'I was so embarrassed, so just carried on, hoping one day it would just finish without me ever having to tell anyone. I just thought he'd disappear once I'd done enough for him.'

All the while, his parents Carl and Rachel* were oblivious to the fact that one of their two 'lovely' sons was in the grip of such trauma.

Ben didn't even own a smartphone, and had only been given a laptop at the age of 13 to do his schoolwork.

'We just let Ben get on with it,' Carl recalls today. 'We had no idea that there was anything to worry about or that there were dangers of any kind. We thought he was using it for schoolwork.'

Only after Ben had attempted to take his own life — following which several of the images were found on his laptop — did Carl and Rachel get called to a police station to be told the horrifying news that their son had been 'groomed'.

'Our lives changed for ever,' Carl says simply. 'We blamed ourselves and we thought we'd failed.

'We used to love life and go out all the time. But after this we just wanted to be near the kids in case something happened.

'Ben tried to get out of the situation so many times but he couldn't. He just felt helpless and didn't know what to do. He was trapped, and too frightened to tell anyone.'

Happily, Ben survived his attempt to take his own life. But in Dunblane, Ros and Mark Dowey are grieving the loss of their 16-year-old son Murray after he, too, was targeted by sextortion criminals, and took his own life last December.

Nothing had seemed amiss when the sociable, guitar-playing, football-loving Murray — known affectionately as 'Muzz' — had retired to his bedroom at the family home around 9.30 in the evening after chatting animatedly about his plans to take a holiday to Marbella this summer.

The following morning, Ros spotted her son's door ajar with the light on. 'I walked in and said: "Are you up?" and found him there,' she recalled in an emotional interview with the Guardian earlier this week.

She and her husband Mark were subsequently told by Police Scotland that evidence on their son's phone suggested that on the night he died, Murray — who his parents say had never shown any issues with his mental health — had been targeted by criminals involved in financially-motivated sexual extortion. All the while, in common with other families, his parents remained oblivious.

'We'd had lots of conversations with our boys about online safety [and] social media... you never, ever imagine it's going to hit you because you're just a "normal family" and these things don't happen,' says his father.

'We were six feet away when this was happening,' Ros adds. 'He just needed to come through to our bedroom.

'So it's about putting the phone down, walking away, saying to someone else: "This has happened – what the hell do I do?"

'Murray didn't do that, and we lost him. To think of my little boy in such distress and not to reach out for help, it's awful.'

Police Scotland is now working with authorities in Nigeria to find the perpetrator responsible.

Tragically, Murray is not the only teenage boy to have taken his life under such circumstances in recent years.

Dinal De Alwis, 16, from Sutton, was a 'gentle' and 'gifted' straight‑A scholarship student at leading boys' school Whitgift who, just a few hours after sharing an ordinary family dinner in October 2022, left home, recorded a final goodbye message to his family and took his own life.

Dinal, one of three brothers and described as a 'golden boy' by his father Kaushallya, had just returned from a family holiday to Mallorca, and his family had 'no idea' anything was wrong. A police investigation subsequently found that at 1am on the day he died, Dinal had been sent two naked photos of himself on Snapchat by a blackmailer who threatened to release the images if he did not send him £100.

South London Coroner's Court heard that the blackmailer wrote: 'So you think blocking me can stop me? What do you want me to do — you want me to send to all of your followers? Why can't you just pay me? £100?'

Dinal responded that he had assumed the pictures had already been distributed. He slipped out of the house at 2am and recorded a brief video of himself walking down a suburban street. His body was found an hour later. 'His loss is the biggest possible loss,' his father recalled. 'It is so incredibly painful. The fact he ended his life this way... the world is so cruel.'

Seven years earlier, 17-year-old grammar school pupil Ronan Hughes, from the rural town of Coalisland in County Tyrone, also took his own life after being tricked into sharing intimate photographs of himself by someone posing as a girl online.

That person then threatened to send the images to his friends if the schoolboy did not pay a ransom of £2,500.

Despite pleading with his tormentor, 'I'm only 17 years old, please, I beg', the photos were sent to five of his friends. Hours after some of them were shared online, Ronan took his own life.

A man called Iulian Enache from Romania was later sentenced to four years in prison after a specialist cyber-crime unit traced the computer he had used to blackmail the teenager.

All too often, however, it is almost impossible for detectives to unravel the vast criminal web behind acts of sextortion.

At Dinal's inquest, Met Police revealed the schoolboy's tormentor was likely using a virtual private network to mask his location but was probably based in Nigeria, part of a sprawling network of criminal gangs operating from West Africa who send 'thousands' of fake friend requests from fake or hacked female accounts to Westerners.

'They cast their net wide,' says Susie Hargreaves, CEO of the charity Internet Watch Foundation, whose remit is to minimise the availability of online sexual abuse content. Her organisation has also seen an eight-fold increase in reported child sextortion cases, with 176 last year compared to 21 the previous year. Sixty per cent of them involved 16 and 17-year-old boys.

'It's organised crime, except the perpetrator isn't in the room any more — they are behind the computer,' Susie told the Mail.

'We continue to be very concerned about internet safety. Parents think they are safe because their children are in the house.' She is struck by the 'enormous panic' experienced by victims, who don't have the life experience to see a way out of something they blame themselves for becoming embroiled in. 'The panic they feel is huge,' she says. 'The shame, the feeling that they're responsible because they shared the picture in the first place.'

As well as calling on tech giants to take more responsibility for content, her charity has, together with the NSPCC, developed a tool called Report Remove to remove online images and videos of abuse. 'Twelve years ago when I first arrived we removed 9,000 web pages, last year 2.75 million,' says Susie. 'Ninety-two per cent of that is self-generated content.'

It is an important piece of armour in the battle against abusers. But, as Hargreaves points out, while organisations are armed with better technology to remove troublesome content from the internet, that same technology also helps the criminals. 'Sometimes it can feel like whack-a-mole' she confides. 'But every image removed is one less piece of abuse.'

Richard Collard, associate head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC, whose Childline is frequently contacted by 'extremely' distressed child victims of sextortion, also called for tech platforms to step up.

'The burden should not be on children to protect themselves from harm online,' he says. 'Tech companies must step up and actively tackle the threat of sexual extortion on their platforms by putting safeguards in place and identifying dangerous behaviour.'

Moreover, that watchfulness should apply to everyone says Iain Critchley, head of child protection on the National Police Chiefs Council, who points out that among young people some aspects of sharing sexual content has become 'normalised', making it easier to lure children in.

'We must all — parents, schools, police — have chats with young people around the risks involved in sharing nude images,' he says.

'As a dad of three I know that having those talks with your kids can be embarrassing, but it is too late once they have lost control of that image.'

Ben knows he is one of the 'lucky' ones. Not only did he survive his attempt to take his own life, but his British perpetrator — who is understood to have been working with around six other men — was traced and jailed for four and a half years.

Nonetheless, the legacy of what happens remains profound. Ben battles anxiety alongside ongoing guilt for what he perceives as the trauma he caused his parents.

'We're the best family ever, but I feel like I let them down,' he says. 'It still affects Mum and Dad and I get really upset about that. We won't ever be able to forget what he's done to us.'

* Names have been changed.

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