In addition to the cases highlighted last week in Sextortion: Virtual sexual assault, wherein predators victimized women and children of both sexes and extorted sexual content, another aspect of online sextortion involves extortion for money.
In this scenario, the predator will friend a subject on social media, strike up a correspondence via direct messaging or email, and exchange explicit sexual photographs. These photos are then used to extort money from the subject under the threat of releasing them publicly. But there is something almost clean in this type of crime—something old-fashioned in extorting money from a victim instead of forcing the victim to produce graphic sexual images on demand.
The Navy has become concerned, according to the Navy Times, as a growing number of sailors are being victimized. Since 2012, there have been 160 reported cases involving sailors, although the actual number of incidents is likely much higher, “given that many victims are embarrassed to report that they've been the victim of such schemes.”
Most of these cases lead to the Philippines, where complaints must be filed in person, making them very difficult to prosecute. In 2014, working with law enforcement in the U.S., Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and Scotland, Interpol was able to smash one large ring in Manila. However, it appears that there are still many who are able to carry on the work from the Philippines.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has embarked on an education program, creating and shipping pamphlets to its offices worldwide for distribution. The NCIS is also working with other services to create a brochure for all military service personnel who are at greater risk of being victimized due to the young age of military service members, their steady income, and their concern that exposure would damage their military careers.
As hard as it is to prosecute these creeps in a place like the Philippines, prosecuting those who commit more egregious offenses in the States is no walk in the park.
The sextortion that the Brookings Institute examined involves the use of sexual images to coerce victims into giving the perpetrators not money, but more graphic sexual images. They threaten public disclosure, which for a child is terrifying, and is almost as frightening for an adult who can face real life consequences from losing a job to losing a spouse. Though not providing visible injuries, the damage is just as real and devastating to the victim as a physical assault.
These crimes are very complicated both to investigate and to prosecute, due to the hodgepodge of state and federal laws that are being applied to this crime endemic to our brave new world. It is clear that our laws have not kept pace with our technology, and both federal and local jurisdictions are using a mixture of charges for the offenses that are committed, leading to wide discrepancies in the sentencing of convicted perpetrators.
The researchers at Brookings, Cody Poplin, Quinta Jurecic, and Clara Spera, led by senior fellow Benjamin Wittes, found wide disparities in sentencing between state and federal prosecutions:
The average sentence in the six state cases in our dataset that have reached the sentencing phases is 88 months (seven years and 4 months). By contrast, the average sentence in the 49 federal cases that have produced a sentence less than life in prison (one case has produced a life sentence) is, by contrast, 349 months (just over 29 years).
The reasons for the disparity are multiple, and include the fact that some state laws are weaker than the federal laws that are used to prosecute the offenders. The federal authorities also have greater resources for the investigation and prosecution of these computer-related crimes.
There are disparities in federal sentencing that are directly related to whether or not the victims are minors, due to strong federal protection against child pornography:
Of those cases that involved minor victims, the sentencing range varied from seven months to 139 years imprisonment, with a median of 288 months (24 years) and a mean sentence of 369 months (31 years). Cases that involved only adult victims, by contrast, involved sentencing ranges from one month to six-and-a-half years imprisonment, with a median sentence of only 40 months and a mean sentence of 38 months. That’s a difference of almost a factor of ten.
The offenses against children tend to be prosecuted under the harsher laws governing the exploitation of children and/or child pornography.
Cases with adult victims only tend to get prosecuted as computer hacking cases, as extortions, or as stalkings. These statutes simply do not yield sentences commensurate with the offense sextortionists are committing against their victims.
The report, titled "Closing the sextortion sentencing gap: A legislative proposal,” presents a very persuasive case for making the crime a federal offense. The most obvious reason is the interstate and even international nature of sextortion:
At least six cases involved more than 10 jurisdictions, either foreign or domestic. Seven additional cases involved more than five jurisdictions. Moreover, 16 cases (21 percent) involve a perpetrator who victimized at least one person in a country other than that in which he was himself residing.
Physical sexual assault rarely involves more than one jurisdiction, as the perpetrator and the victim must necessarily be in the same place for the assault to occur. Online sexual abuse does not have that same physical requirement and can easily cross jurisdictional boundaries. The federal government is best prepared to handle these cases.
The Brookings Institution report points out that federal government is also better prepared to handle the computer forensics that are sometimes needed to find the perpetrators of sextortion. And the disparities of sentencing due to weaker local laws versus the more stringent federal ones would be eliminated. One law for the same crime, regardless of where that crime originates or occurs, would do much to ensure equal justice.
Moreover, and perhaps less concretely, there is civic value in giving a crime a name. Sextortion is not computer fraud and abuse. It is not simple extortion by means of a threat of reputational damage. It is not identity theft. And it is not stalking. It is something else.
Since the publication of the two-part report in May, a couple of concrete actions have been taken. Within days of the report’s appearance, Sen. Barbara Boxer wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking the Justice Department to start collecting data:
Court records show that some of these cyber-criminals have blackmailed hundreds of different victims online. However, since specific data is not collected by any federal entity on online sexual extortion, the full extent of this crime is largely unknown. In an attempt to better understand and address these serious threats facing women, men and children on the Internet, please provide information outlining the efforts the Department of Justice is taking to collect this critical data.
This is a critical first step, as there is currently no comprehensive data available that describes the full extent of the problem. Different entities track different cyber crimes, but no one has, as yet, accumulated any data on this crime.
Earlier this month, in a bipartisan effort, Massachusetts Democrat, Rep. Katherine Clark, and Indiana Republican, Rep. Susan W. Brooks, introduced the Interstate Sextortion Prevention Act, which takes direct aim at the problems uncovered by Brookings, as well as the extortion attempts that the Navy is trying to deal with.
“Increasingly, people, especially women, young people and children, are falling victim to online sexual extortion, and the Interstate Sextortion Prevention Act gives our law enforcement partners the tools they need to go after these sexual predators,” Brooks said. “This bill will provide victims, law enforcement officers and prosecutors with more support and resources to prevent predators from continuing to victimize people online and to make sure that these criminals will be prosecuted and punished to the full extent of the law.”
In a July 14, 2016 post for his Lawfare blog, Benjamin Wittes writes about the bill, saying that it is:
a thoughtful and serious piece of work that deserves careful consideration and provides a good template off of which legislators can work.
It is a beginning. And your support, expressed to your congressional representative, can help get this legislative effort underway.