ASIAN STORIES For lust and money: When online sexual encounters end in despair and death
By Raquel Carvalho
This is the third and final piece in a series of stories on image-based abuse supported by the Judith Neilson Institute’s Asian Stories project, in collaboration with The Korea Times, Indonesia’s Tempo magazine, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and Manila-based ABS-CBN. Elyssa Lopez, Neil Servallos and Sonia Sarkar contributed reporting. The piece contains descriptions of a sexual nature.
Daniel Perry, 17, thought he was talking to a pretty American girl from Illinois. They soon began swapping pictures online – nothing unusual for two teenagers.
The problem was that the girl didn’t exist.
Perry, in Scotland, had fallen prey to a gang operating out of the Philippines. After secretly recording a webcam chat with him, the criminals told Perry that unless he paid them off, his friends and family would see the video. At a loss for what to do next, he took his own life by jumping off a bridge in July 2013.
Less than a year later, Interpol-backed operations in the Philippines saw dozens of suspects arrested. There was praise, the raids were dubbed a success – and there seemed to be hope that the family of Perry, an apprentice mechanic in Dunfermline, would find some closure.
But almost eight years on, his relatives have yet to see justice, much like the thousands of survivors of online sextortion who never made headlines.
With cases increasing amid the Covid-19 pandemic, we spoke to survivors in multiple locations, including Britain, Ireland and India, who were deceived and blackmailed.
Sextortion cases typically involve criminals trying to befriend men by posing as an attractive woman on Facebook and other platforms. But those who lure and engage with targets, or the “chatters” – some of whom are hired by gangs – come from a variety of backgrounds, and are sometimes minors.
With illicit operations mostly based in the Philippines, Morocco, and the Ivory Coast, experts say this form of image-based abuse is an emergent international industry shaped by the convergence of technology, money-transfer companies, cryptocurrencies, and ill-equipped authorities.
Striking back
By the end of 2013, it became obvious to the authorities that the issue of sextortion could not be resolved within a single country’s borders – a joint international response was required.
The plan was called Operation Strikeback. As laid out in an Interpol document, its genesis was in Singapore that November, when officers from the Interpol Digital Crime Centre first met police representatives from Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines.
Other international meetings took place, while investigations unearthed details of at least three criminal groups based in the Philippines that were targeting people overseas. Then things moved remarkably fast.
On April 30 and May 1, 2014, raids were conducted in Bicol, Bulacan, and Laguna provinces and Taguig city in the Philippines, resulting in 58 arrests and the seizure of 250 items, including electronic equipment. Among those arrested was Archie Tolin, who used the alias Gian, and was suspected of targeting Perry and other British nationals.
The operations were, according to Interpol, the result of intelligence sharing between the Philippines, the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, England, and Scotland. Two others followed, one in the summer of 2014 and another in 2016.
But the investigation into Perry’s death is still ongoing, according to a spokesperson for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service in Scotland. While a warrant had been issued for Tolin in connection with Perry’s death, no further details could be provided.
So what happened after these high-profile operations? And why has Tolin not been brought to justice?
What we learned shines a light on the challenges authorities from different continents face when they try to work together.
Brigadier General Robert T. Rodriguez, director of the Anti-Cybercrime Group of the Philippine National Police (PNP), told This Week in Asia that the Philippine authorities were aware of Perry’s case when they took Tolin into custody in 2014.
“During the Strikeback operations, Tolin was arrested due to an offence different from the one associated with the suicide of the Scottish minor,” he said, explaining that the police “needed something so that they could get their hands on Mr Tolin”.
At the time, he said, the Philippine government was willing to file charges against Tolin relating to Perry’s suicide.
“So we requested evidence sharing, documents from the United Kingdom, to build up the case, like his death certificate and the parents’ complaint. However, the UK insisted on prosecuting Tolin in Scotland and never provided the police here in the Philippines with those documents,” Rodriguez said.
“What the UK later did was to request the testimony of Tolin and other possible witnesses – if our recollection of the fact is correct.”
But the requests came too late. By then, Rodriguez said, the case for which Tolin had been arrested had already been dismissed in court and his whereabouts were unknown – and a Philippine court never issued a warrant for his extradition to Scotland.
Colonel Bernard Yang from the PNP, who took part in the Strikeback operations, said they “were actually a very good example of international cooperation. The investigation was really fast, we were able to collect information from our counterparts overseas, and I do think we hit these syndicates hard.”
But he acknowledged that the course of justice was often slow, and some of the suspects arrested during the raids were out on bail.
“We are quite frustrated, but according to the law here [suspects in] those cases are bailable,” Yang said.
Trials are still ongoing for at least three sextortion rings identified during the Strikeback operations, according to documents provided by the PNP through a Freedom of Information request.
The queen who got away
In the second round of Operation Strikeback, in August 2014, the Philippine police arrested eight more adults for sextortion and rescued five minors who had been exploited by the gang.
Among those apprehended was the woman dubbed the “Queen of Sextortion”: Maria Cecilia Caparas-Regalachuela, known as Cecille Caparas, who is believed to have led such activities in several towns in Bulacan province.
This raid stemmed from complaints received by the Philippine police from sextortion survivors based in Hong Kong, where hundreds had been targeted as the criminal group racked up illicit earnings of some HK$4 million (US$520,000).
Although the suspects were expected to face charges such as robbery and extortion, it is unclear what happened after this. News reports suggested the charges against Caparas were dropped and she was able to evade the authorities due to her wealth and connections.
What we do know is that Caparas was once again arrested for sextortion in September 2016, in the third round of Operation Strikeback.
Rodriguez from the PNP said he did not have much information regarding Caparas, who is believed to have been in a relationship with a policeman. “I think she is lying low,” he said.
Philippine prosecutor Jinky Dedumo did not respond to repeated requests for comment regarding Tolin and the cases related to Caparas.
According to Yang, who was with PNP’s anti-cybercrime group for about a decade, Tolin had no connection to Caparas’ gang.
He said Tolin, only 20 years old at the time of his arrest, was part of a “bunch of students who were doing crazy things online”, while Caparas’ gang “was much more professional and organised – most of the village was involved”.
Another police officer who participated in the Strikeback operations said Caparas’ modus operandi had been detected in survivors’ complaints until at least 2018. While he is not able to confirm whether she remains active, he said sextortionists operating today still used her approach of focusing on foreigners.
Other strategies, however, have changed. The chatters could previously be traced to specific locations, such as offices with computers, but many of these have been shut down by the authorities.
“Right now, they aren’t using a call-centre type set-up, it’s guerilla-type [from their own homes],” he said, adding that this made it more difficult to track them.
Complicating matters is the fact that the Philippines uses an internet protocol that hosts thousands of users in one internet protocol (IP) address, while criminals also try to hide their real locations by using virtual private networks (VPNs) and encrypted apps such as WhatsApp.
Rodriguez said his unit was following individuals with suspicious financial transactions, though he noted that sextortion crimes were mostly perpetrated by unemployed people who lived in the country’s slums.
“They find it to be easy money,” he said. “Maybe they started as single individuals doing this kind of crime. When their neighbours see that it’s a good source of income, then it flourishes.”
This Week in Asia reached out to 10 individuals in the Philippines who had tried to extort money from local and overseas targets – their contacts were shared with us by survivors and other sources. But most did not respond to our interview requests, and one demanded financial compensation, which we did not agree to provide.