It was a hazy Monday morning in 2019 when a social media content creator, Muna (surname withheld) got a message from a suspicious email address, asking her to pay the sum of $3,000 if she did not want to see her nudes online.
Apprehensive, she searched her heart just as she did her archive to ascertain who may be behind the mail.
She had just got off what she described as a toxic long-distance relationship with another content creator she identified with his stage name, Sharmuel, after dating him for nearly six years.
“We shared a lot of nudes. I have his and he has mine, so I did not think he would be behind the email,” she said in an interview with our correspondent.
She added that after a few months of not responding to the message, she got a follow-up email from the same address containing her nude photos which she claimed she only shared with this particular lover.
Muna also noted that she had blocked Sharmuel on all social media handles and deleted all pictures or memories of him on her phone and other devices.
She, however, confronted him with the claims that he sent the email, but Sharmuel said he would not have done that as, according to him, he also deleted memories of her before his phone was stolen.
Perplexed, she reached out to her friends who also had access to her phone, but they all denied having any involvement in the matter.
Another message from that address asked her to pay up the $3,000 in two weeks or risk having her nude in public.
“I was more than troubled. I took my phone to a system operator to format it back to factory setting. I wanted a clean slate. I am not a promiscuous person. I did not know what to do and I did not want to involve the police because, apart from the fact that the blackmailer warned me not to go to the police, I also knew that the police would first slut-shame me before they even begin to work, and this may take too long,” she added.
After begging the blackmailer to change the currency to naira and accept N200,000, she was asked to get the money in cash and go to Ojodu-Berger Bus Stop and give it to one of the e-hailing drivers who would be stationed there to receive it.
On that day, Muna said she carefully wrapped the N200,000 in an old newspaper, taped it and put it in a cellophane bag before taking it to the bus stop. At the bus stop, just by the market, she saw a delivery guy stationed there who approached her, asked her to give him the package and drove off.
She said she did not get another email from the blackmailers for months. Not even one to confirm that they had seen the money.
She was, however, shocked when she received her intimacy video on WhatsApp from a foreign number, asking her if she recognised the lady in the video.
Of course, she did. She was the one in the video.
She said she asked the person how he got the video and was asked to visit a website, where, not just her but hundreds of girls’ nude pictures and videos were published and available to the public for free.
“I almost died. I had to open up to my parents before they would see it. I was asked to come home. We met a lawyer but there was nothing he could do. We traced the initial email back to that website and we sent them a cease and desist, which never got a response. The video was still on their site until we paid a hacker to take it down from there and through the help of Google, got it off the dark web,” she added.
Saturday PUNCH reached out to Sharmuel after an independent investigation by a hacker engaged by our correspondent linked not only his IP address to the poster of Muna’s nude on the website, but also a continuous engagement on the content in question, but he did not respond as of the time of filing this report.
Text messages sent to his mobile numbers were also not responded to.
Muna is one of the many victims of revenge porn.
Many persons, especially women found to be vulnerable, popular and have a lot of things to lose, are often times blackmailed and humiliated over nude pictures or intimacy videos they recorded, or did not know were recorded.