Don’t wank during video calls, warns police

A day after Royal Thai Police warned women to be wary of “sextortion” on Valentine’s Day, men have been told not to wank during video calls. Police reckon it could lead men open to blackmail by fraudsters using fake profile photos of attractive women.

Pol Col Siriwat Deephor, deputy chief of the Technology Crime Suppression Division (TCSD), reported that dozens of men, children, women and children have been victims of these scam gangs.

Fraudsters use fake photos of beautiful women in their profiles and sent friend requests to potential victims on social media. After they become online friends the conversation is changed and they engage in sexually explicit chat. The victims are then coerced into turning on their cameras and masturbating during a video call, reported Bangkok Post.

The fraudulent groups record these videos and exploit them to extort the victims.

Pol Col Siriwat reported that if the victims refuse to pay, the gangs threaten to expose the masturbation videos to their friends or family or release them online.

“Normally, the gangsters concentrated on extorting money from their victims and do not publish the videos. However, recently some videos had been disseminated even though the victims had paid the money. This caused damage to the victims.”

Pol Col Siriwat advised men not to masturbate during any video call or send such videos or photos to anyone.

“People with information about the operations of these gangs could alert police via https://tcsd.go.th around the clock.”

Yesterday, Pol Col Siriwat warned couples about the dangers of recording their sexy time on Valentine’s Day.

He said some women may be susceptible to blackmail if the relationship ends and the footage falls into the wrong hands.

“Lovers may voluntarily record their sexual intercourse. [But] if they break up in the future, men may release the clips online and damage women.

“Such cases fall into the category of “sextortion” by those who have pornographic material of others in their possession. Such wrongdoers could be people with close relationships or strangers who managed to convince others to share their private pictures online.

“Such private images could be abused for blackmail – to demand money or sex – as offenders could threaten to post the pictures or videos in public.

“Sextortion is only one of several categories of crimes linked to love, although it causes the greatest financial and reputational damage.”

Bitcoin sextortion scams have been quite popular over the past few years. The scammers email you to say they’ve videoed you on your webcam performing sexual acts in private, and demand money in Bitcoin to keep the video (which doesn’t exist) private.

Sextortion scammers frequently use spoofed or made-up email addresses to contact their targets. It is best to just ignore them and not engage.

Pol Lt Col Nopawan Panya, the deputy spokeswoman of the Royal Thai Police Office, made known that 168 reports of romance scams and 235 reports of hybrid scams were reported last month.