After Michigan Teen’s Suicide, Nigerian Brothers Plead Guilty to Planning Deadly Sextortion Scheme

This story is about suicide. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please contact Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Two Nigerian brothers pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiring to sexually exploit teenagers. sexual extortion, or “sextortion,” two years after one such scheme led to the suicide of a Michigan teenager.

Jordan DeMay was 17 when Samuel Ogoshi, 22, and his brother Samson Ogoshi, 20, both Nigerian, posed as a woman on Instagram using a hacked account and started a conversation with the teenager, the eventually blackmailing him into sending her money. and threatening him further until he committed suicide in March 2022.

“I don’t know if there’s any good enough justice for what these two men did to Jordan,” Jordan’s father, John DeMay, told Fox News Digital. “But I believe there is justice in this plea deal…to a certain extent, I guess. But overall, it’s just emotional. It’s hard to believe we’re even in this situation .”

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He continued: “I hope these guilty pleas will also bring some small relief to the family of Jordan DeMay, who died as a result of this crime. Of course, the work is not done. The Ogoshi brothers await their sentencing further late this year, and we are still pursuing the extradition of the third defendant, Ezekiel Robert.”

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The Ogoshi brothers face a minimum sentence of 15 years and a maximum of 30 years for each charge of conspiracy to sexually exploit minors. An indictment against the two brothers alleged they were involved in hundreds of similar schemes, many involving minors.

“We are so lucky to be here. So many families have open cases. Some don’t have cases at all,” John DeMay said. “Some are still wondering what happened to their loved ones, and we are truly fortunate to be on the eve of Jordan’s second anniversary and to have guilty pleas and suspects extradited from another country. It is therefore quite colossal that this is even an event.”

DeMay added that he feels both happy and sad, and “like this is kind of the beginning of the end of this phase.”

“But I am extremely satisfied with the work that has been done,” he said.

Robert, the third suspect charged in the sextortion plot that led to Jodan’s death, is awaiting extradition to the United States.

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The same night the Ogoshis began communicating with Jodan via Instagram, the teen sent an explicit photo of himself to the account he thought belonged to a woman. Samuel Ogoshi threatened to expose it and make it “viral” online if Jordan didn’t immediately send money, prosecutors said. Jordan complied and sent money to the suspect, but the crime only escalated as Ogoshi demanded more and more money from the 17-year-old.

The exchange lasted for hours over the course of a single night until Jordan told Ogoshi he was going to kill himself.

“Good,” he wrote. “Do this quickly. Or I’ll make you. I swear to God.”

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U.S. Attorney Mark Totten for the Western District of Michigan said in a statement Wednesday that the Ogoshis’ “guilty pleas represent an extraordinary success in the prosecution of international sextortion.”

“These convictions will send a message to criminals in Nigeria and around the world that by working with our partners here and abroad, we can find you and bring you to justice,” Totten said.

Sextortion is a crime trend on social media in which bad actors entice or solicit a minor to engage in sexual acts or send money to blackmail them, according to the FBI, which has received more than 13,000 reports of online financial sextortion involving at least 12,600 victims between October 2021 and March 2023.

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The average age of sextortion victims is between 14 and 17, the FBI said in a news release earlier this year, but the agency noted that any child can become a victim. Perpetrators of financially motivated sextortion typically come from countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, according to the FBI. The FBI also saw a 20% increase in sextortion incidents involving minors between October 2022 and March 2023.

Sextortion can lead to suicide and self-harm. Between October 2021 and March 2023, the majority of victims of online financial extortion were boys. Those reports included at least 20 suicides, the FBI said.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has created a free service called “Take it Down,” intended to help victims of sextortion delete explicit images of victims or get bad actors to stop sharing them online. The tool is accessible on https://takeitdown.ncmec.org.

Original article source: After Michigan Teen’s Suicide, Nigerian Brothers Plead Guilty to Planning Deadly Sextortion Plan