3-year sextortion probe from Buffalo to Ghana to D.C. reveals growing trend

Surveillance camera footage from the lobby of a building down the street from the U.S. Capitol provided a break in the three-year search for the person who was extorting a young man from Buffalo, New York.

Cross Cole, a 21-year-old citizen of Ghana, who is linked to a 2022 stay at a rental property in Washington, D.C., was charged last week with the sextortion scheme.

Cole's arrest is part of a growing wave of such cases nationwide and illustrates the complicated and international nature of these attacks.

Sextortion, in which schemers threaten to release illicit photos of victims unless the victims pay them, has surged nationwide.

An FBI affidavit reviewed by CBS News said Cole had obtained a naked photo of the victim from years earlier, when the victim was a minor. Prosecutors also alleged Cole had accessed a nude image of the victim's friend, while the friend was also a minor. The victim's email account was hacked, and his social media account security was compromised, federal prosecutors said.

"The victim sent $200 to the CashApp account but cancelled the payment after speaking with his father," Michael Digiacomo, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, said in a public notice about the case. "He then continued to receive multiple text messages from the same telephone number that made the threats."

The affidavit reviewed by CBS News said agents eventually tracked down an IP address linked to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., that had accessed the victim's account in October 2022. A security camera image in the affidavit allegedly shows Cole entering an AirBNB rental facility at the Capitol Hill address in October 2022.

The affidavit said Cole's mother, who is also a citizen of Ghana, had rented a space in the building through AirBNB that month. A judge has ordered Cole to be detained, pending trial. His next court hearing is scheduled for September in Buffalo federal court.

Safety experts and federal law enforcement officials told CBS News that a growing number of these sextortion schemes are being executed by foreign nationals against children and young adults in the U.S. FBI records obtained by CBS News show a nearly 500% increase in reports of sextortion since 2019.

The FBI and safety groups have been trying to raise awareness around cases like Cole's. Targets are increasingly young men. Experts say these victims are less likely to report the incidents.

In some of the newest wave of sextortion cases, schemers lure children and young adults into sharing illicit photos by pretending to be someone who's about the same age. In other cases, including the one described in the charging documents against Cole, suspects are accused of hacking into the social media accounts of victims to obtain the illicit images.

"These cases are like something we've never seen before," said Lauren Coffen, director of the Exploited Children Division at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

"We are used to people being able to reach out and engage and chat with children for sexual reasons. They wanted the images, they wanted to be able to maybe meet up," Coffen told CBS News. "Now, they want money. And that's a totally different motivator than what we're used to seeing in exploitation."

"People have no idea how targeted our teenage boys are right now," Pauline Stuart told CBS News.

Stuart's son, Ryan Last, died by suicide hours after a sextortion scheme was threatened against him in 2022. The Justice Department says Last's death showed the pervasiveness of international criminals in sextortion schemes. In an announcement in May, the department said four men in Côte d'Ivoire had been arrested on criminal charges related to their alleged role in an international sextortion scheme that targeted thousands of victims, including Last.

"The sad reality is this is not an uncommon event," said Digiacomo, whose office is prosecuting Cole's case. Though he would not comment on the details of the Cole investigation, Digiacomo said the pervasiveness of sextortion cases is troubling and largely unrecognized by some parents.

"Oftentimes in these cases, there are very young victims," Digiacomo told CBS News, "The perpetrators will say 'Just send me the pictures and I'll leave you alone.' And the victims think (sending money) is the easy way out or the only way out."

Digiacomo and the National Center for Missing Exploited Children both told CBS News that the international component of the conspiracies complicates efforts to track down and stop sextorters.

According to the FBI affidavit in Cole's case, agents connected an iCloud account to Cole that included a note listing multiple Yahoo email addresses and passwords.