In the wake of thousands of reports of teen boys being tricked into sharing sexually explicit photos and threatened with exposure unless they paid up—a scenario blamed for more than 20 teen suicides in the U.S. since 2021—the FBI and law enforcement partners from Canada, Australia, and Nigeria conducted a first-of-its kind operation that resulted in charges against some of the most egregious perpetrators of financially motivated sextortion.
As a result of Operation Artemis, FBI investigations led to the arrest of 22 Nigerian subjects, with at least one arrest linked to an American victim who took their own life.
The coordinated effort started almost two years ago when the FBI began reviewing and associating thousands of disparate reports of teens being targeted and victimized on social media platforms. Analysis of victims’ phones and social media accounts revealed heartbreaking narratives of young kids enduring panicked negotiations in bids to maintain their privacy.
In these types of sextortion cases, minors—usually boys—are befriended online by someone pretending to be a pretty girl and seduced into swapping nude photos. When the boys comply, they’re suddenly ordered to send money or risk having their intimate photos exposed. Investigators say that even if the victim pays, the demands usually continue and the threats escalate.
In early 2023, a unit in the FBI’s Criminal Division that focuses on child exploitation sifted through terabytes of communications and uncovered thousands of digital breadcrumbs that led to Nigeria. The Child Exploitation Operational Unit assembled priority lists of subjects to locate and interview in the West African country, including some of the cases that involved suicides.
The FBI, through the legal attaché office in Nigeria, coordinated all this with Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the country’s lead agency for investigating financial crimes. Other partners included federal agencies in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom that had similar sextortion cases resolving to Nigeria.
In late summer 2023, a team of FBI special agents, analysts, and forensic examiners—along with criminal investigators from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)—set up a discreet temporary command post in the city of Lagos. The operation was dubbed Artemis after the Greek goddess who protects youths. In Nigeria, the teams worked in shifts for weeks at a time exchanging information with EFCC investigators to facilitate the arrests and interviews of Nigerians whose digital footprints appeared to connect them to some of the most appalling cases in the U.S.
“Everybody was equally invested in making this one goal happen,” said Special Agent Karen R., who managed the Bureau’s coordination of the sextortion cases that led up to the weeks-long operation in Nigeria. While Canada and Australia are well-known partners for the FBI, Karen pointed out that Nigeria’s EFCC has a uniquely strong track record of working with the Bureau, particularly on sprawling financial crimes that both countries are trying to stamp out.
“They are just as invested as we are in trying to make this problem go away,” she said. “We all know Nigerian prince scams. We know all of the scams that are traditionally done there. They’re aware of it, too, and don’t like that their country is known for that type of activity.”
Indeed, as everyone set out in the summer of 2023 to find and arrest the criminals and bring them to justice, Nigerian authorities were on a parallel mission of trying to dissuade would-be scammers in their own country from taking up sextortion and other financial crimes as an easy way to make money.
Poverty is widespread in Nigeria, and jobs and opportunities are scarce. Smart, tech-savvy, college-aged individuals with a phone, nude images scraped from the internet, and a script for duping faraway boys might view sextortion as a viable trade with little risk or downside. “These subjects do not take into account that there’s a person on the other end of that conversation,” said Supervisory Special Agent Robert Cameron, who was an assistant legal attaché in Lagos at the time and interviewed several subjects during the operation. “They’re just looking for easy money.”
Abba Sambo, a supervisor in Nigeria’s EFCC who participated in the operation, echoed that sentiment. “Because they don’t actually see the suffering of the victim, they tend to see it as a game,” he said. “When people get to see for real this negative impact, it tends to dissuade them from taking part in these activities.”
At least that’s the goal. The US Department of State has expressed hope that the gravity of federal prosecutions in the US against Nigerian nationals will serve as a stark deterrent in the African country.
“An operation like this is a strong message to criminals that their acts will not go unpunished,” said Michael Ervin of the US Consulate in Lagos.
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“We encourage Nigerians not to become involved in this type of sexual exploitation and abuse. Sextortion has serious repercussions.”
The role played by Nigeria’s EFCC was essential to the operation’s success. While investigators from the US, Canada, and Australia had arrived with robust cases, actually finding and capturing suspects in a country bigger than Texas, with more than 200 million people, fell to the Nigerians to accomplish.
“No matter how good the FBI is, they may not be able to penetrate our terrain the way we do,” said Michael Wetkas, zone commander of the EFCC region that includes Lagos. “We know the terrain very, very well. So, they will find us very useful in that regard.”
Supervisory Special Agent Scott Dahlstrom, who was an assistant legal attaché in Lagos, said the EFCC was able to go to even the most remote areas without the restrictions that would have been placed on foreign law enforcement agencies like the FBI, AFP and RCMP.
“They’re able to get out there,” he said. “They’re able to effect arrests and really just be a great complement and a great partner.”
The FBI command post in Lagos coordinated with EFCC investigators as arrests were made, with hopes that the phones and devices they picked up during those sweeps might reveal the subjects’ involvement and identify their victims.
Forensic searches of the confiscated devices often helped agents build their cases and the lines of questions. A forensic examiner usually sat in on the interviews at the EFCC’s zonal headquarters in Lagos to signal when the digital evidence they had uncovered appeared to contradict subjects’ claims of ignorance or innocence.
“It was really beneficial to be in the room and be able to say, ‘Hey, that’s not what we’re seeing in your phone,'” said Thomas Million, an analyst in the FBI’s Child Exploitation Operational Unit. “You can’t really say you didn’t do it when we’re seeing it right here. They just couldn’t combat it because we had all the evidence right there.”
For the agents who spent months investigating cases or preparing for the operation, a chance to question a subject offered an opportunity to highlight the severity of these crimes.
“We made it clear that we were here trying to figure out what happened,” Special Agent Karen R. said. “We were very specific in how we were approaching those interviews, not only to make the best case possible and make sure we get justice, but also to let them know this isn’t a victimless crime. It’s very easy when you’re on the other end of a cellphone or a laptop or some other electronic device to think that person isn’t real. But this is real life.”
In the US, as well as in Canada and Australia, there’s been a notable spike of reports of financially motivated sextortion. Sextortion has been around for years and was used to mostly trick young girls into sharing intimate pictures and then threaten them with exposure if they didn’t keep providing images. Sexual gratification was the driving force in most of those cases, and the crime was often time-consuming.
But in financially motivated sextortion, the perpetrators’ goal is to make money fast—and often.
According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), there were more than 34,000 victims of sextortion in 2023, and that number increased to more than 54,000 victims last year. Over the last two years, there have been nearly $65 million in financial losses due to this crime. Teenage boys are often the most common targets, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
“We understand that boys can unfortunately be soft targets,” said Tora Bly, an FBI intelligence analyst embedded in the child exploitation unit. “It’s a little bit more easy to manipulate them into sharing different material that will be compromising.”
Special Agent Matthew Crowley interviewed several subjects in Nigeria and asked them why they chose this scam over other more lucrative types of financial schemes, like romance fraud or business email compromise scams.
“One subject said, ‘It’s easy money. I can just move on to the next one if I don’t get any traction,'” said Crowley. “It makes sense why they would go that route because they could target 40 victims in a day working multiple at a time. And maybe of those 40, three pay. But if three paid $200, that’s $600. They might not get $600 working romance fraud for two months.”
That logic also highlights a clear way to avoid falling into the sextortion trap: don’t engage. Chances are very likely that it’s not a pretty girl trying to connect. And responding—with images or any information that makes you vulnerable—is not worth the risk.
“I want teenagers to know that just because someone sends you a picture or sends you a video, that doesn’t mean that they are real or that’s really them,” said Special Agent Molly Blythe, who works out of the FBI’s Jackson Field Office in Mississippi and was on one of the FBI’s teams in Lagos. “It’s a big danger.”
More than 12,600 minors—mostly boys— were targeted in sextortion schemes in the U.S. and abroad from October 2021 to March 2023, based solely on reports received by the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and NCMEC. In 2023 alone, the non-profit organization received 26,718 reports of financial sextortion, up from 10,731 reports in 2022.
In addition to vetting and managing tips and investigative leads from field offices and partners, the Bureau needed to make sure victims and families in all these cases were getting the help and resources they needed.
A core message to victims is that they are not alone.
It’s a big problem in the U.S. and elsewhere. In Australia, there are about 300 new cases there every month, according to the Australian Federal Police.
“For a while, it was 100 reports a week,” said Ashley Gilgore, a supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Intelligence Unit. “A lot of what we were doing was trying to identify who the victims were based on the usernames … and getting them the resources that they need to get through this.”
“They need to know that this isn’t just happening to them,” said Kevin Mulroney, an AFP detective at the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation who was on the team in Lagos. “It’s happening to children all over Australia, all over the world. So, they’re not alone, and it’s not the end of the world.”
Special Agent Blythe said emotions run high in the heat of the moment, but she asks teens who fall into the trap to give themselves time to put it all in perspective. “If you make a mistake and you send something explicit or nude,” she said, “give yourself time to walk away from it. It’s not worth your life.”
A father whose 16-year-old son took his own life in 2023 after sextortion threats said he was surprised to see the FBI go all the way to Nigeria to arrest suspects. The fact that someone on the other side of the world came into his home and attacked his son is something he and his family are still coming to grips with.
He urges other parents to be wary, to talk to their children without judgement, and to put reasonable restrictions on when their kids can use their phones. He said he wished his son would have come to him rather than try to handle the seemingly existential threats of an unseen stranger.
“Everything that he loved, everything that he had plans for, every college ambition he had, every girl he liked, every friend he had—those things were all threatened right then,” said the father. “Imagine somebody walking into your home in the middle of the night and shooting your son. Well, this person did something even worse than that. He scared him so bad that he shot himself.”
Sergeant Derek Bonner, an RCMP investigator in British Columbia, led an investigation there of a 14-year-old who died by suicide earlier this year. He and the Australian investigator were added to the team in Lagos because of case similarities that could help the overall operation.
Bonner said the show of force—of international partners from federal agencies in different countries coming to Nigeria to effect arrests and prosecutions—should give would-be criminals pause.
“I think it was important in that it would show that suspects can’t hide behind their computer, behind their cellphones, just because they’re in a different country or on a different continent,” said Bonner. “That if they’re going to commit these crimes internationally, then international partners are going to hold them accountable for what they’ve done.”
The AFP’s Mulroney was equally blunt in his message to would-be criminals in Nigeria. “Stop,” he said. “Leave our kids alone, because it’s no longer anonymous. You’re no longer free to do this. We will follow you, and we will find you.”
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