WVU Police Warn Students After Four Sextortion, Fraud Cases Reported

West Virginia University police say they have received reports of at least four cases of fraud and extortion targeting students in recent months, part of a scheme in which predators pose as someone else online, coax victims into sharing intimate photos, and then demand money to keep those images private. Officers describe the tactic as sextortion, and they say it is showing no signs of slowing down on campus.

According to CBS Pittsburgh, victims in some recent cases met suspected predators on dating apps or social media before being asked to share intimate photos, a request police call an obvious red flag. Once a victim complies, the scammer threatens to publish the images unless money is sent, and in several cases the victims did send funds to the online predators. Lt. Jeff Wright, quoted in the report, said most of the scammers are located outside the country, which makes them difficult to identify and makes it hard for victims to recover any money they've already lost.

Wright said the scams are getting worse, and he emphasized that giving predators money rarely ends the problem. Instead, an initial payment tends to invite further demands, with online predators asking for more money once they realize a victim is willing to pay. Scammers also use spoofed phone numbers and, in some cases, hack accounts outright to obtain private data or photos, according to the same report.

A Scale Problem Bigger Than One Campus

WVU's Morgantown campus enrolled 23,532 undergraduate and graduate students in fall 2025, according to the WVU Office of Data and Analytics — a large population of young adults that fits the profile cybercriminals frequently target. That local exposure mirrors a national pattern: a University of South Florida study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in June found that financial sextortion primarily targets men ages 18 to 30, who are often lured off dating apps onto secondary messaging platforms before extortion demands begin.

The scale of the problem nationally is enormous. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children recorded more than 50,000 cases of financially motivated sextortion in 2025, averaging roughly 137 reports a day — up sharply from 36,000 cases in 2024. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported in its 2025 Annual Report that cyber-enabled crime losses nationwide surpassed $20.8 billion across more than one million complaints, a 26 percent jump from the prior year.

Payment Platforms and Overseas Networks

Analysis published by Dynamic Securities Analytics found that sextortion perpetrators commonly direct victims to send initial payments through peer-to-peer apps like Cash App, Zelle, and Venmo, or through gift cards and cryptocurrency, with Cash App cited as among the most frequent platforms in reported cases. That pattern lines up with Wright's account of scammers operating from outside the United States and evading identification. Meta announced in August that it removed roughly 63,000 accounts originating from Nigeria connected to organized financial sextortion networks targeting international users, as reported by CBS News, underscoring how deeply transnational these operations run.

Federal prosecutors have shown willingness to pursue these networks across borders. In September 2024, two Nigerian brothers were sentenced in federal court to 17.5 years in prison after being extradited to the United States for running an international financial sextortion ring, a case that followed a Michigan teenager's suicide linked to the scheme, according to legal summaries relayed by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Legal Exposure and What Victims Can Do

West Virginia law treats these schemes as serious felonies. Under West Virginia Code § 61-2-13, obtaining anything of value through extortion or attempted extortion carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison for a completed extortion and up to 3 years for an attempt, according to the WV Legislature. State lawmakers also updated extortion definitions to explicitly cover threats to publish intimate personal images.

The FBI instructs victims to immediately cut off contact with scammers, preserve chat logs and screenshots as evidence, and file a complaint at IC3.gov, stressing that paying rarely stops the threats and usually invites higher demands. NCMEC also runs a free tool called Take It Down, which assigns digital fingerprints to intimate images so participating platforms can detect and remove them; the service, built with initial funding from Meta, works anonymously and does not require uploading the actual photos.

WVU police are urging students to verify that anyone they meet online is a real person before sharing personal information, and to never send money or personal details to unverified contacts. Officers encouraged victims to come forward without shame, noting that anyone online can become a target. Students who believe they've been targeted can reach WVU police at 304-293-2677 or 304-293-3136.