Leave the squeezing for the fruits

Like many others, I also watched the news this week that extensively covered the "Moroccan sting" - as the Israeli police called it; The wave of extortion attacks on Instagram, which has so far affected a large number of Israelis who have fallen victim to extortion of thousands of shekels, under the threat that sexual videos in which they participated - will be published in various places.
The method is simple, but still not enough has been done to prevent it in terms of awareness and important precautions that were not taken. The numbers of Israelis who fell into the trap are the proof that the threat is far from internalized: a supposedly young and attractive girl, holds conversations with the victim, acquires his trust after a certain period of time and the conversation turns romantic. From here it's a short way to an intimate video call during which the "girl" reveals herself to the victim, which gives him the freedom to expose himself to her in an explicit sexual way.

In most cases, in such a situation, an additional video will no longer be necessary; The scam is revealed, followed by the financial demand and the threat to publish the video, if the victim refuses to pay the extortion fee.
Along with the statement that the blackmail method is simple, I must say that it has also been refined and become more "invested". Until recently, more than half of the ransom calls were quite identical calls, threatening to publish sexual content of the victim, when in some cases, the victim heard intimate general details about him from the attacker, and assumed that one or another video of his past was indeed in the possession of the attacker, but in reality, they did not exist at all Such videos! The attacker's working assumption was that some of the victims would disregard and reject the threat, while another part would panic, surrender and pay...

The police instructions not to address these messages, encouraged the attackers to switch to threats of sexual content with "meat", literally. Now the pressure on the victim is great, and hence his tendency to lose his temper and make more mistakes, apart from the series of mistakes he made when he was tempted from the beginning to believe that the attacker is indeed who he claims to be.

What to do? The best solution was not to do it in the first place, not to be tempted, and then no problems would arise either. And the step is taken, and despite the pressure, I say from my experience that still, and in any case, it is not recommended to give in to the extortionists' demands; Not because they are unable to carry out their threat, but for the simple reason that there is no guarantee that they will keep their word and not ask for additional funds. This has happened countless times and will happen again in the future. Attackers know how to detect pressure from a victim and may well take advantage of the situation to their advantage for extortion or more extortions. It is important to contact and complain to the police, report this to the content platforms where the sensitive content was published and ask for it to be removed.

And again, the best solution is prevention and taking precautions. It's worth remembering: as long as you haven't met the party with whom you talked, and as long as you don't have real and certain details and means of identification about him, he is a potential suspect for extorting information from you.
You should be careful now not to pay the price later, literally...