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- You receive a Facebook friend request. Judging by the photos, she’s a young woman. You don’t know her, but she’s lovely, and you’re intrigued. Why not? You accept her request. You’ve just unknowingly triggered the first mechanisms of a sextortion trap.
While investigating the world of fake Facebook profiles, my colleague Marie-Eve Tremblay and I have discovered a massive network of fraudulent accounts that catfish their male victims using stolen photos of young women and adolescent girls. This is the story of the months-long investigation that allowed us to piece together the inner workings of this network of online bandits.