17-year-old Youngster Committed Suicide After Being Scammed

During the month of February, Ryan Last received a text message from an unknown sender whom he initially mistook for a female. The online conversation swiftly moved from being casual to being personal, and then it became criminal.

The con artist, acting as a young girl, deceived Ryan by sending him a photo of herself naked and then requesting that Ryan send her an explicit photo of himself in exchange. The cybercriminal demanded $5,000 immediately after Ryan shared a private photo that he had taken of himself, threatening to make the photo public and send it to Ryan’s family and friends if he did not get his way. 

The teenager from San Jose, California, explained to the cybercriminal that he would be unable to pay the full sum, which resulted in the demand being reduced to a portion of the initial total, specifically $150. However, once Stuart had paid the con artists out of his savings for college, he said that the con artists “kept wanting more and more and placing plenty of continuing pressure on him.”

During that moment, Stuart was completely unaware of what her son was going through. She was given the information after law enforcement authorities pieced together the sequence of events that led up to her husband’s passing.

At ten o’clock in the evening, she had said Ryan goodnight and had described him as her typically upbeat kid. At two in the morning, he had fallen victim to a con and decided to end his life. Ryan wrote a note before he took his own life in which he expressed how ashamed he felt of himself and his family. Pauline claimed that as he was thinking about it at the time, “He honestly, truly thought that there wasn’t any way to get by if those photographs were actually uploaded online.” “It was clear from his note that he was shaking with fear. That level of fear should never be inflicted on a youngster.”

The deception is known as “sextortion” by law enforcement, and investigators have reported an increase in the number of complaints from victims. This has prompted the FBI to step up their campaign to alert parents from coast to coast.

According to the FBI, there were more than 18,000 complaints related to sextortion in 2021, and victims reported losing more than $13 million. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), it is a significant offense for offenders to exploit child pornography to entice potential victims. CNN has been informed by both Stuart and the FBI that the investigation into Last’s case is still active. 

“To be a criminal that specifically targets children — it’s one of the more deep violations of trust I think in society,” says FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dan Costin, who leads a team of investigators working to counteract crimes against children. Costin is the leader of a group of investigators who are working to prevent crimes against children. 

According to Costin, the majority of the sextortion scams that have been reported to the FBI have been proven to have originated from criminals on the African continent as well as in Southeast Asia. According to Costin, federal investigators are collaborating with their law enforcement counterparts throughout the world to assist in the identification and arrest of individuals who prey upon children via the internet.