Before we start today's show, I want to let you know we're going to talk about suicide and some other tough subjects. If you or someone you know needs help with thoughts of suicide or self harm. A list of helplines is available at Opencounseling dot.
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On March twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, Jordan DeMay, a high school senior in Marquette, Michigan, was getting ready to leave the cold Upper Peninsula behind for spring break in Florida. That night, he was at his girlfriend's house.
They were kind of saying the goodbys. As I'm sure you can imagine at that age, to be a part was a really big deal.
That's Olivia Carville. She's an investigative reporter at Bloomberg.
So he was over at her house. He kissed her good night. He drove home and started to peck for his trip for Florida.
The next day, when Jordan got back to his dad's house, he had a message on Instagram from someone he didn't know, a teenage girl.
Initially, she just wrote to her and said, hey, that.
Wasn't out of the ordinary. Jordan was a high school football and basketball star, and he often heard from people he didn't know.
He was repeatedly in the local newspaper for his athletic successes, so he was well known in that community and right across the Upper Peninsula.
The message he got that night was from someone with the username Danny Roberts.
He replied asking who she was. She said that she was from Texas but now doing school in Georgia, and they started chatting just about a regular kind of teenage things, school life, and he was doing his laundry.
Danny and Jordan kept chatting, and a couple hours into their conversation it took a turn. She told Jordan she liked playing sexy games.
She then sends him a naked photograph of herself and asks for one in return, but she sets some conditions on what she wants that photo to look like. She wants it to have his face in it, and she wants him to have a cute face or a cute expression. Goes down to his bathroom and he takes a selfie in the mirror, exposing himself, and he sends that back to Danny.
And then everything changed.
From via forward, the conversation spirals into what I can only describe, as you know, one of the most dark, sadistic message exchanges I've ever witnessed. Reading through the transcripts.
Today on the show What Happened to Jordan de May Inside a horrific and fast growing form of cybercrime targeting teens. I'm David Gerra, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News. The morning after Danny Roberts started that conversation with Jordan on Instagram, Jordan's mom saw he texted her during the night. Jordan was staying at his dad's house.
I woke up about six o'clock in the morning to get ready for work and get my kids off to school, and I saw a text message from that came in the middle of the night that said mother, I love you.
That's Jordan's mom, Jennifer Buda.
I texted him back immediately said I love you too. I hope you got a good night's sleep. I continued to get ready, drove my children to daycare. It was about seven o'clock, so I know that Jordan should be up about that time, and he didn't respond to me. And Jordan always responded to me, so I sent him another text that said, are you okay, and as I got home, I still had not received a text, and something didn't feel right with me, so I sent him a third text that just said Jordan.
I found out.
That Jordan was gone seven forty in the morning.
She got the news from Jordan's dad, John DeMay, went to check on Jordan that morning and found that he died by suicide.
The first twenty four to thirty six hours, you know that it was challenging to try to process what even happened. I mean, we were just so flabbergasted that we were, you know, the giant question mark why, you know, we just couldn't figure it out. And we were going through all these scenarios and it was he, you know, breaking up with his girlfriend of something going on, and what happened is someone come at him. I mean, we just had no idea.
There were really no indications that Jordan had depression, that he was suffering from unhappiness, that he struggled with mental health. All those red flags that you might assume to see in a suicide case just weren't here.
Reporter Olivia Carville says his death confused investigators. No.
I remember talking to the lead detective who actually went on to really solve this case. When he walked into Jordan's b the morning of his death, he understood the what of the case. This is how he described it to me, and by what I mean, what am I seeing? I'm seeing this looks like a suicide case. But the why, the why that happened wasn't clear. And he looked around Jordan's bedroom and as a detective, you look for clothes, and all he saw was a bag packed for Florida
with swimsuits and sunscreen. His cell phone. The alarm on his cell phone kept going off, So why would he have set his alarm if he didn't intend to go to school the next day or didn't intend to wake up the next day. Every indication was that Jordan was planning to wake up the next morning. And I think that was really confusing for the detective, and that gave him pause or made him realize there might be more to this than what's just on the surface.
Instagram transcripts helped law enforcement piece together what happened in those early morning hours. Well, Jordan was chatting with someone with the username Danny Roberts.
As soon as that nude picture is sent, that flirtatious teenage girl disappears, and what is left behind is someone cruel who torments Jordan, who tells him that now that he has this nude photo, they're going to ruin his life.
Olivia obtained excerpts of those transcripts and she read us the next message Downy sent Jordan, I.
Have screenshot all your followers and tags and can send this nudes to everyone and also send your nudes to your family and friends until it goes viral. All you have to do is cooperate with me and I won't expose you.
What Danny wanted was money.
Initially, the amount that they agreed to was three hundred dollars. As soon as he sent that money, they came back asking for more than they wanted, eight hundred dollars, and Jordan actually sent a screenshot of his bank account showing that he only had fifty five dollars in it, and he said he was willing to send everything he had to prevent them from sending that photo to his girlfriend, and they replied saying no deal. And then there was this back and forth around three am, and.
At this point Jordan started to sound really terrified.
Jordan, why are you doing this to me, I am begging for my own life Danny ten nine eight. I bet your girlfriend will leave you for some other dude, Jordan, I will be deared like I want to kill myself. Danny Sure, I will watch you die a miserable death. Jordan. It's over you winbro. I'm killing myself right now because of you. Danny. Good, do that fast, or I'll make
you do it. I swear to God. I have no idea what was going through his mind, but from reading the messages that he was sending, it's clear that he was losing hope and he didn't know where to go from here, so he made the decision to delete that entire message history with the Danny Roberts account. So around three point thirty am, Jordan sends two text messages, one to his mum, one to his girlfriend, and then he kills himself.
The entire conversation took less than six hours. So who was Danny Roberts. That's after the break. Before the break, we heard about a conversation on Instagram Jordan de May had before he died by suicide. In less than six hours, Jordan went from packing for his spring break trap to taking his own life.
Everyone is just in shock, and the police start that investigation. Jordan's body is removed from the house and no one knows what's happened. His phone gets sent to the Computer Crimes Unit for a forensic analysis, but it takes a few days to get that response back, so law enforcement are looking for clues in other areas.
And reporter Olivia Carville says, while that's happening, Jordan de Maaye's friends and family, his teachers and classmates, and his girlfriend Kyla trying to process what's happened. Kyla can't keep up with all the messages she's getting on her phone.
People are calling her, texting her. They don't believe that Jordan's really dead. News of his death is spreading, and she's getting contacted by strangers on social media, and she's with a friend of hers, just trying to reckon with what's happened. And she sees all of these messages coming through in the steady stream, and she starts opening some of them. And it was around three o'clock that afternoon that she opened one from an Instagram music called Danny Roberts.
The message contained no words, had just had a photograph, and that was the node photo that Jordan had seen the previous night.
Kyla and Danny start to exchange messages. Here's Olivia reading from that transcript.
Kyler, what is this about Danny? Do you know him? Kyler? Do you? Danny? Answer me? Kyla? Who are you? Danny?
I beat?
You know him? Kyler? That's my boyfriend. Why Denny? I swear I will ruin his life with this? Kyler? He killed himself last night. Please don't Danny. Do you want me to ruin his life? Kyler? He's gone. No.
It goes on like this. Then Danny tries to extort Kyla.
Denny, do you want me to end this and delete the picks? Yes? Or no? Cooperate with me and this will end. Just do as I say and all this will end.
For law enforcement, this exchange was a critical clue.
They saw the nature of that blackmail and the back and forth. The detective immediately thought this could be the why, the why Jordan de May decided to end his life, so he filed preservation requests to Meta to try and pull data from the platform to show what was said between Jordan Demay's account and the Danny Roberts account, and as soon as he had that account and he saw
what was discussed between the two. He searched for the IP address of that Danny Roberts account and it led him directly to Lagos, Nigeria, and.
What law enforcement discovered was two brothers in their early twenties were posing as Danny Roberts. Court record show Samson and Samuel Lagoshi had bought hacked Instagram accounts, including one belonging to the real Danny Roberts. In their emails, there was a word for word script of what was in the messages sent to Jordan. Olivia says these kinds of sample extortion scripts have been widely shared on the Internet by a group called the Yahoo Boys, and that.
Comes from the email address that they use to try and swindle Westerners. Back in the day, decades ago, there was the Yahoo email scam or the Nigerian Princes. They have evolved. This is the latest scam effort from this loosely affiliated online gang and now instead of using traditional romance scams or praying on the elderly, they are directly
targeting teenage boys across North America. These scammers are sharing information, encouraging one another on what to say, how to say it, how do I act like a teenage girl, how do I make this believable, how do I turn the conversation flirtatious, how do I get that naked photo? And how do I blackmail effectively?
Olivia found videos on TikTok and YouTube in which people are sharing these blackmail scripts and encouraging one another. You can hear how matter of factly the scammers explain how to extort people.
In today's video, I'm going to explain about blackmailon opted.
These are the pictures that you need to start the job.
Both companies said in written statements that they'd remove posts related to this scam that had been brought to their attention and vowed to continue to take down such content, but we found similar content still exists on both TikTok and YouTube. Olivia read a report by Paul Raphile. He's an analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute who's documented hundreds of thousands of posts on social media like these.
He found a post of exactly what was sent to Jordan to May, down to the typos, and they had more than half a million views.
I was completely surprised.
Jordan's mom Jen, butda you know the FBI.
Had put out a press release the day before this happened to Jordan, warning parents, and you know that was all brand new information to me.
The FBI has said they're aware of more than twelve thousand victims across North America right now. They're putting out PSAs to try and stop it, which is what they think, you know, the only thing we can really do to try and prevent or curb this crime.
But Jordan's parents do think there's something else that could prevent this from happening to other families. They want social media platforms to take action. Jordan's parents have filed a lawsuit against Meta, Instagram's parent company.
They're literally allowing criminals to thrive on them, and they're not doing enough to prevent it. They've been to congressional hearings time and time again as the same song and dance, and they're protected by a federal law in section two thirty that basically gives them carte blanche liability that says, no matter what happens on our platforms, we're not held liable no matter what we do. So sorry that crime is happening, but it's not our problem.
In a statement, Meta's global head of safety said sextortion is a horrific crime and the company has spent years building technology to combat and to support law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting the criminals behind it. And Olivia says the platforms have been taking action.
They have been doing things like sending sextortion focused warnings to users of their products. They have been using artificial intelligence to try and detect suspicious accounts. They have been just recently, Meta announced it was going to use AI to blur nudity in photos that are sent between accounts and doing what they can from a trust and safety
standpoint to try and proactively stop this crime. But you know, the bad act is a savvy and as soon as a guardrail is put up, they come up with ways to evade it, get over it, get under it, and the crime keeps changing as the social media networks create ways to prevent it.
Meta says it tracks new trends so it can quote regularly improve its tools and systems. The case, filed by John DeMay and Jen Butda, is part of a group lawsuit alleging social media companies have harmed children by designing addictive products. Meta said the company can't respond to questions about pending litigation. There's also a criminal case involving the two brothers who targeted Jordan. To May, they were extradited from Nigeria to the US, and last week they pleaded
guilty to conspiring to sexually exploit teenagers online. I talked to Jordan's parents after those guilty please. They'd driven from Marquette to watch the court proceedings in person.
The emotional part was just, you know, wrapping her mind around that these two guys that I'm looking at in the courtroom, you know, were the ones that were torturing my son that night, and we're finally getting some emission from them out of their own mouse.
I was hoping that someone would be held accountable for what happened to Jordan, and yesterday with those guilty please, someone is held accountable, and that is justice for Jordan, justice for community. It will never bring my son back. It does not change my life. It does not change the pain I feel how much I miss my son
every single day. And overall, it's an extremely unfortunate situation that involves not just our family, but the family of these two individuals as well, and it's not good what happened for anybody, and as a mom, I struggle with feeling bad for their mom that she probably is really missing them and she's an innocent bystander, just like I.
Am Jordan's mom. Jen says she hopes the outcome will send a message to extortionists.
That you can be found, you can be brought here and held accountable, and that are US Department of Justice is willing to do that in order to keep our kids safe.
But Jen Buda has a message of her own for other families.
I want parents to sit down and have a very open conversation with their children about who they talk to on social media and if something doesn't seem right, it doesn't feel right. If someone's asking you for money or favors or pictures, you should question that. There needs to be an ongoing conversation with kids, also letting them know that if they are targeted by someone, it's going to be okay, and to go for an adult, a trusted adult, for help. Law enforcement does want to help you.
You are the victim.
You are not doing anything wrong and this is just a small blip in your life that even if you did send a photo, your life will go on and nobody will recall that this happened.
If you or someone you know, it's help with thoughts of suicide or self harm. A list of helplines is available at opencoonseling dot com. This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera. This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Robert Friedman. It was mixed by Rishiba Jakol. It was fact checked by Thomas lu Our senior producer is Naomi Shavin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beamster bor is
Our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Thanks for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll be back tomorrow