Inside sextortionists twisted world of black magic and blood sacrifice which are killing US teens

Last month, cybercrime researcher Paul Raffile found himself in a muddy Lagos shantytown, watching a witch doctor chop the head off a live goose, then pouring its blood over a photograph of an American porn star.Inside the cardboard-and-steel shack, littered with potions and talismans, a large machete lay on the floor and a mysterious bag rustled in the corner.The witch doctor was performing black magic ritual to bless a sextortion scam, scrawling the names of the victim — a teenage boy in Wisconsin — and an online impersonator, “Lucy,” onto charms, to “fuse their souls together.”Using this fake honeytrap, the scammer will try to get the teenager to give compromising information, perhaps naked pictures.Then they will extort them for money.  Sextortion cases have claimed the lives of atleast 40 teenage boys in the US since 2021, according to the US State Department.The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has told The Post it receives almost 100 reports of financial sextortion a day or around 33,000 each year since 2021.In 2024, the FBI reported $33.5 million had been pillaged from Americans in sextortion scams — with the actual number estimated to be much higher due to the severe underreporting, largely due to shame.Nigeria is the world capital for cyber scams, and the same year overall internet scam losses totaled $16 billion from the US, with extortion and cyber fraud topping the list.Raffile and his associate Erin West, a UK-based former prosecutor, had come to the Nigerian capital after setting up a trap to catch a scammer and see how they operate.

He built a fake Instagram account posing as an American teen — within days, he says, a dozen West Africans had reached out.One took the bait, but by using their own cyber trickery hidden in the crypto payment sent to the scammer, they were able to retrieve the scammer’s exact location and snap of photo of him using his own phone camera.Soon Raffile and West were on a flight to Nigeria...