Last month, cybercrime researcher Paul Raffile found himself in a muddy Lagos shantytown, watching a witch doctor chop the head off a live goose, then pouring its blood over a photograph of an American porn star.

Inside the cardboard-and-steel shack, littered with potions and talismans, a large machete lay on the floor and a mysterious bag rustled in the corner.

The witch doctor was performing black magic ritual to bless a sextortion scam, scrawling the names of the victim — a teenage boy in Wisconsin — and an online impersonator, “Lucy,” onto charms, to “fuse their souls together.”

Using this fake honeytrap, the scammer will try to get the teenager to give compromising information, perhaps naked pictures. Then they will extort them for money.  Sextortion cases have claimed the lives of atleast 40 teenage boys in the US since 2021, according to the US State Department.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has told The Post it receives almost 100 reports of financial sextortion a day or around 33,000 each year since 2021.

In 2024, the FBI reported $33.5 million had been pillaged from Americans in sextortion scams — with the actual number estimated to be much higher due to the severe underreporting, largely due to shame.

Nigeria is the world capital for cyber scams, and the same year overall internet scam losses totaled $16 billion from the US, with extortion and cyber fraud topping the list.

Raffile and his associate Erin West, a UK-based former prosecutor, had come to the Nigerian capital after setting up a trap to catch a scammer and see how they operate. He built a fake Instagram account posing as an American teen — within days, he says, a dozen West Africans had reached out.

One took the bait, but by using their own cyber trickery hidden in the crypto payment sent to the scammer, they were able to retrieve the scammer’s exact location and snap of photo of him using his own phone camera.

Soon Raffile and West were on a flight to Nigeria to confront the extortionist—subject of a short documentary they released online this month.

It works like this: a network of scammers, almost always young men in Nigeria or nearby West African nations, “bombs” American teen boys on social media with fake accounts pretending to be flirtatious female peers, using sophisticated tactics to coerce their victims into sending illicit photos.

They then demand money via Cash App or gift cards, Raffile said, first in a single payment and then more, while threatening to release the photos they have been sent.

The attacks are rapid and relentless. Embarrassed teens are sometimes found dead within hours of initial contact with a scammer—as was the case with 15-year-old West Virginian Bryce Tate. He took his life last November in his dad’s man cave just two hours after he was contacted by a suspected Nigerian scammer.

Oludayo Tade, a sociology professor at Nigeria’s University of Ibadan, told The Post discouraged scammers seek evil charms to cast a spell and “to dispossess their victims.”

“A spiritual approach to cybercrime is to enhance the success rate. The power to keep the victim under a spell is needed by those who may have suffered losses with previous prospects. This is why hypnotism may be sought from spiritual providers,” Tade said.

The witch doctors, known as Babalawo, are themselves outcasts, Tade said.

“Evil charms are forbidden in the traditional religion,” which is a mix of Christianity, Islam and traditional African beliefs. “So the spiritualists who do evil charms are rebuked and considered deviants and criminals within the traditional religion setting.”

A 2024 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute found Instagram was the most common platform for sextortion schemes to take place, followed by Snapchat.

That report also tracked the way the scammers, who call themselves “Yahoo Boys” or “BM Boys” (BM for “blackmail”) coordinate to target a victim, share tactics on creating fake social media profiles, discuss AI tools, and workshop blackmail scripts.

One script shared among scammers on Scribd suggested introductory questions like, “What do you like to do for fun?” before the scammers are shown how to entice the victim into sharing explicit photos.

Once obtained, they write, “Hey I have ur nudes and everything needed to ruin your life.”

In Nigeria, Raffile discovered the Yahoo Boys were using photos of real-life porn stars to create fake profiles. In order to create the personas, they sold packages of OnlyFans models’ photos to one another for around $10 a bundle.

The Nigerian scammers are brazen to the point of making memes to mock their victims—referred to as “clients”—sharing screenshots of the torment they’re inflicting and otherwise celebrating their success in executing depraved criminal acts.

They’re motivated by their own social media clout as much as money, Raffile claimed. Many BM Boys even become local micro-celebrities with hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok.

“Their goals are fame and fortune. Fortune comes first, but they also like the fame. They go viral showing off their scams and trying to recruit others,” said Raffile.

He dismissed any sentimentalists who claim poverty drives them to a life of cybercrime.

“We asked the scammers, ‘Why do you do this?’ Their initial response was always, ‘Oh, well, we’re poor and we don’t have money.’” Raffile recalled.

“We saw that they have nice shoes, Louis Vuitton branded things, gold jewelry, a newer iPhone than I have. One of them has a Mercedes-Benz. It’s not about poverty.”

Raffile said this was confirmed by countless interactions with other locals, who grew up in the same neighborhoods and conditions as BM Boys but were living on the straight and narrow.

“They chose to make money the right way with a legitimate job. And they rejected this idea that they have to scam in order to make a living. And they’re successful,” he said.

Arrests for West African sextortion scammers are extremely rare. In 2023, two Nigerian brothers—Samuel Ogoshi, 22, and brother Samson, 20—were sentenced to 17 years for their role in running a sextortion ring connected to the suicide of 17-year-old Michigan teen Jordan DeMay.

Last November, Nigerian scammer Imoleayo Samuel Aina, 27, was tracked down and extradited through joint US-Nigerian law enforcement efforts. Aina used a fake online persona called “Alice David” to extort explicit photos from 20-year-old Kutztown University student Jack Sullivan, who then tragically died by suicide.

Aina pleaded guilty to cyberstalking and wire fraud, among other charges, and got a 72-month federal prison sentence.

Other families are left completely helpless as the person responsible for their child’s death continues to flaunt piles of money on TikTok and target other youngsters. That’s led some parents into civil action against the tech platforms themselves.

Shippensburg, Pa. mom Tricia Maciejewski filed a wrongful death suit in December 2025 against Meta over the death of her 13-year-old son, Levi.

On August 20, 2024—less than 48 hours after creating his first Instagram account—a scammer posing as a young girl demanded $300 in gift cards from Levi under threat of exposing their intimate conversation to his friends and family.

Levi offered the predator $37, the only money he had, before he died by a self-inflicted gunshot in the family’s backyard. Authorities ruled it a homicide tied to the extortion.

Ohio parents Tamia and Tim Woods also joined a lawsuit against the tech giant in March, alleging wrongful death, product defect and negligence.

Son James, 17, died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Streetsboro, Ohio bedroom in 2022 following a 19-hour ordeal when a sextortion scammer he met on Instagram sent over 200 threatening demands for payment.

Both lawsuits are still active. In a statement to The Post, Meta called sextortion a “horrific crime” and emphasized its work with law enforcement, said it automatically places teen accounts into the strictest message settings and that it has “developed safety features to help prevent this abuse — blurring potentially nude images sent in DMs, warning people of the risks of sending them, and letting people know when they’re chatting to someone in another country.”

Raffile eventually confronted the sextortionist who had taken his bait, and felt he was able to provide some poetic justice by turning the tables.

“We weren’t threatening him. We were just saying, ‘We know who you are and we know what you’re doing. And we’ve reported this to law enforcement and they will find you,’” he said.

“He was scared. Immediately after we confronted him, he changed his name on TikTok and went private.”