Two Nigerians arrested over sextortion case of Australian boy who died by suicide

April 8 (UPI) -- Two people in Nigeria have been arrested and charged over the sexual extortion case of an Australian teenager who died by suicide, authorities said Monday.

The victim was a teenage boy who police said was speaking online with a person presenting as female. He then took his own life under threat that intimate pictures of him would be sent to family and friends if he did not pay an extortion fee.

His death prompted an investigation last year that tracked the offenders to Nigeria, the New South Wales Police Force announced Monday.

The suspects were only identified by Australian police force as "two young males." It said they were arrested last month in a Nigerian slum home to some 25 million people.

"The males will be dealt with locally, where authorities have the power to prosecute the Australian-based offenses," the police force said in a statement.

Detective Superintendent Matthew Craft, commander of State Crime Command's Cybercrime Squad, said they allege there were "a number of communications" between the suspects and their victim, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

"It started off [with] bikini shots and then slowly as the conversation progressed, there were further images exchanged and certainly as those images were exchanged less clothing was certainly prevalent in that particular offending," he said.

Once those more intimate pictures were exchanged, "the conversation then turned, and that young person was extorted for financial benefit that," Craft said.

According to Craft, there has been a 400% spike in sextortion cases in the last 18 months, but that represents the number of young people reporting such crimes.

"We want young people to continue to report these cases, and to never be embarrassed to talk to police," he said in a statement. "Sextortion is a very real crime that we can take serious action against."

Sextortion is when a criminal actor coerces a victim to create and send them sexually explicit material. The perpetrator then demands money or more content from their victim under threat to release the material.

According to the FBI, victims tend to be males between the ages of 14 and 17, and the offenders are often located in West African nations, such as Nigeria and the Ivory Coast.

In May, three Nigerian men between the ages of 19 and 22 were charged in the United States over the sextortion of Jordan DeMay, a 17-year-old Michigan resident who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in March of 2022.

The FBI said that from October 2021 to March 2023, it had received more than 13,000 reports of online financial sextortion of minors. At least 12,600 of the victims were boys.

Of those reports, at least 20 of the victims died by suicide, it said.