1128: Sextortion | Skeptical Sunday

24:54The 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. It's 10 o 'clock.

25:29Do 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. They had no idea where I was. If I came home too late, they were like, where did you go?

26:01Oh, 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, OK, 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. No, me and my friends walk three towns away, share a single pack of cigarettes like passing around a joint like, you know, walking train tracks and dodging trains or whatever else is the magical time to be a miracle that we're still here. It really is. We've been 30 since we were 12 years. That's right. The cliche is that you had to be home when the streetlights were on or whatever.

26:34I 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 it. At a very young age. And like, 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.

27:14Like 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.

27:51Like 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.

28:25Then 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.

29:00That 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, OK? And then 20 years later, you find out that Mr. Johnson is like a serial child molester. 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.

29:34They 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.

30:10That 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.

30:47The only reason that those 80 ,000 are like, who cares? The kids are blowing it out of proportion is because nothing happened. Kid 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 percent 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.

31:28I 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.

32:03But 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. Okay. 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?

32:35Like, 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.

33:07Noted. OK. If we're 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.

33:46And 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. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust.

34:29I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at sixminutenetworking.com. I know that networking just sounds like a gross, cringey word. This course is super easy, very decidedly non-cringe, and down to earth, it's not awkward. It's just very practical exercises that will make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer. In four to six minutes a day, five-minute networking was taken. That's all it takes. Anyway, many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

34:56You can find the course, again, for free at sixminutenetworking.com. 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. And I was curiosity about the opposite sex at the age of nine, but I did not have Internet. 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.

35:34They 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. OK, 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.

36:06It 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.

36:42So you've got this profile on TikTok or whatever it is that kids 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. What's the groomer thing that you mentioned?

37:23You 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 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 two 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 and I'll be relatable.

38:00But 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 grownup. 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.

38:36And 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.

39:13I 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 form of finesse, emotional attachment, manipulation.

39:47But with a boy, I can see, hey, here's some boobs. Now show me your wiener. 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.

40:22Like 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?

40:53I 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, yo, go away. I'm going to call the cops. The kids are terrified. They don't want to bring their parents into it.

41:30And 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 like you know this is not some like 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 like 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 gonna 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.

42:44It'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.

43:21They'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.

44:12That 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. it. 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.

44:44They 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.

45:21Terrible. 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.

46:00You 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.

46:38It 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.

47:22And 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, 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.

47:51I 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.

48:34I'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, 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 can't do anything about it.

49:19It'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 100 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.

49:56I 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 grownup, 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.com show notes at Jordan harbinger.com advertisers deals discounts, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

50:49I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And yes, I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today.

51:17In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the 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.

51:58So 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.

52:39So 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. and 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.

53:31To hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.