Ben Wilde* was a popular and academic 14-year-old when he received a chatty Facebook message from a girl he'd never met, who claimed she was friends with someone on his school football team.
'Gifted' student Dinal De Alwis took his own life after being blackmailed with nude photos by a stranger on social media app Snapchat Now aged 22, Ben can still vividly recall the panic and shame he felt on discovering he was a victim of 'sextortion', the name given to a phenomenon in which ruthless criminal gangs — often from West Africa and South-East Asia — target young people online.
Murray Dowey took his own life aged 16 in December last year after becoming victim to sextortion by a man posing as a teenage girl online Such is the mounting level of risk that the National Crime Agency this week took the unprecedented step of issuing an alert to school teachers across Britain — at both primary and secondary level — to be on guard for children being targeted by 'extremely malicious' criminals who leave a devastating legacy.'I'm constantly thinking about it, and what he did. You feel like you haven't done enough to protect your children, who are the world to you.
'With the bigger demands came bigger threats,' says Ben, who says the messages left him in a state of abject terror. Ben didn't even own a smartphone, and had only been given a laptop at the age of 13 to do his schoolwork. Happily, Ben survived his attempt to take his own life. But in Dunblane, Ros and Mark Dowey are grieving the loss of their 16-year-old son Murray after he, too, was targeted by sextortion criminals, and took his own life last December.
'We'd had lots of conversations with our boys about online safety social media... you never, ever imagine it's going to hit you because you're just a"normal family" and these things don't happen,' says his father. Dinal De Alwis, 16, from Sutton, was a 'gentle' and 'gifted' straight‑A scholarship student at leading boys' school Whitgift who, just a few hours after sharing an ordinary family dinner in October 2022, left home, recorded a final goodbye message to his family and took his own life.