Rizzle Kicks star lifts lid on growing crime that's 'devastating' teenage boys

Daily Mirror

2 days ago

Rizzle Kicks star and Jade Thirlwall's partner Jordan Stephens has opened up about filming his new sextortion documentary for Channel 4 - revealing the 'heartbreaking' real victims
Rizzle Kicks star Jordan Stephens hasn't shied away from danger for his first-ever documentary - flying over 4,000 miles to confront a Nigerian sextortion scammer. The 33-year-old explores just how teenage boys are being impacted by social media sextortion, with scammers tricking young men into sending nude pictures of themselves before financially blackmailing them.
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In Channel 4 's Hunting My Sextortion Scammer, Jordan allows himself to be sextorted by a scammer over social media before using cutting-edge technology to locate and track down the faceless criminal alongside a security detail. Despite entering hazardous situations to interview those behind these crimes, Jordan found looking into the victims' stories even harder.
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'Obviously I knew about scamming before but I was learning [about sextortion] in real time,' Jordan says of the investigation. 'To learn that boys are taking their own lives was heartbreaking and devastating.
'It's boys not understanding the consequences or risks of engaging online but with that panic, they can go from a normal life to not a life within half an hour and that is really scary.'
The documentary speaks to the brothers of 15-year-old Murray Dowie, who killed himself after being blackmailed in a sextortion scam. The Dunblane student was catfished by a scammer posing to be a girl his age, who tricked him into sending intimate photos before threatening to make them public.
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'He was just like every other teenager and then one day he was dead,' Murray's older brother Ryan, 19, says in the documentary. 'He never liked being the centre of attention. The fear for him, the panic was that he would have been the centre of attention. That must have just been awful for him.
'There is someone responsible for the death of my brother but I have absolutely no clue who. It's a faceless crime.'
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In a bid to raise awareness of the issue and bring at least one scammer to justice, Jordan - who is the boyfriend of singer Jade Thirlwall - set up several fake social media accounts in the hopes of being targeted by a sextorter.
With many sextortion scammers asking for payment in gift cards, Channel 4 enlisted the help of a web developer to create a site that would locate a scammer when they tried to redeem the fake gift card. Attracting a sextorters turned out to be easy, but coaxing them into allowing the gift card site to use their location data proved to be much harder. When one criminal finally took the bait, the scam was interrupted by Instagram instead.
'Not only did he not accept it initially but his account was shut down in the middle of the extortion,' Jordan says. 'His account was disabled in the middle of the exchange. We thought, 'We were so close!''
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However, the same sextorter made a new account and popped back up to continue to con, having been given an AI-generated selfie and the nude pictures of a consenting life art model by Jordan. This time, he began shouting abuse at Jordan over the phone, threatening to ruin his life if he didn't send the gift card.
'I literally had to coach him into accepting the revealing of his own location. That tech has not been shown before on TV.'
Finally, a location pin came through via the website - showing the sextorter to be in Erunmu, a small village in Nigeria. The African state has become a hotspot for sextortion plots in recent years, with Meta shutting down 63,000 accounts connected to the crime just last year.
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'It's difficult to wrap your head around the fact that that can all be occurring in this rural space and that one piece of technology with the potential to ruin a life that was 6,000 miles away,' Jordan says.
With this new information, Jordan boarded a plane to Lagos to track down his sextorter, but not before he was met by his own security team and local cybercrime investigator Priye. 'We have very high rates of kidnap around,' he tells Jordan in the documentary. 'Always watch your back.'
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Jordan admits that he was sufficiently warned of the dangers ahead of flying - and was even told not to tell friends that he was travelling to Lagos. 'The security detail put a ridiculous amount of fear into me before the trip - there are dangers of course in most countries, especially one with that level of wealth inequality, but you have to use your common sense,' he says. 'They were just sending me really extreme news stories. I even bought a burner phone.'
After sending Priye on a reconnaissance mission to identify their conman, they found their man - a barber in the village with a similar voice and the same username that was used to sextort Jordan. The Rizzle Kicks star confronted him over FaceTime after his security detail decided that it was too dangerous to do so in person.
'It was quite surreal. I'm 90 percent sure it was the guy. He was running his business and trying to get a little extra on the side,' Jordan says. 'Suddenly he couldn't speak English, suddenly he didn't understand the name or the number.'
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For those in countries like Nigeria where the exchange rate is weak, sextortion crimes can prove to be lucrative. In the documentary, Jordan interviews young Nigerian criminals who can pay a year of their rent just by blackmailing a Brit for £200.
'We spoke to some boys who didn't want to think about the consequences. One boy mentioned not having any support - he's 17. So you have 17-year-old boys extorting 15-year-old boys to try to survive,' Jordan says.
'It's the equivalent of a 15-year-old boy in the UK scamming someone and getting £35,000 if you were to change that exchange rate. That's why it's happening so often.
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As the rate of sextortion cases on the rise in the Britain, Jordan hopes that the documentary will send an important message to young boys and parents. 'The realistic thing is as a teenage boy, you're going to make mistakes. Another thing I want to change is the general conversation around sex when we're younger and understanding our bodies and our feelings. '
'So if it's happened, it's just removing that sense of shame. Instead of that panic, you can 100 percent speak to a person and you can get past it.'
He adds, 'The preventative measure is don't respond to any messages from anybody that you don't know in person. There should be more stringent measures on how you even get an account on social media, in my opinion.'