'Sextortion blackmailer made £2m' threatening to release sexually explicit photos

An alleged "sextortion" blackmailer may have earned as much as £2million by allegedly threatening to publish compromising photos and videos of boys.

Olamide Shanu, 33, is set to appear in court in London in May after an extradition request from the United States.

Shanu allegedly posed online as a teenage girl, to try and persuade boys to send him sexually explicit material of themselves.

It is then alleged that Shanu would threaten to send the material to the victims' family, friends or even the media, if they refused to pay him.

At least three UK schoolchildren have taken their own lives as a result of being blackmailed over sexually compromising content.

It is reported that one alleged victim had set up a payment plan with Shanu, paying him £240 a week, until the blackmailer had received almost £8,000.

Shanu's cryptocurrency account is thought to have received more than 6,000 payments over a three-year period, leading investigators to believe that the number of victims could be in the hundreds.

The National Crime Agency put out a chilling warning last week, claiming that children were being targeted in sexual extortion scams.

Terrifyingly, they said the number of cases involving children has soared in the last two years, to 890 in 2022. There has been more than one high-profile case of a child in the UK taking their own life after being blackmailed.

Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane in Scotland, died in December 2023 after being blackmailed by an actor or actors with possible links to Nigeria, according to MailOnline.

Dinal De Alwis, also 16, took his own life after a blackmailer threatened to post nude photos of the teenager all over social media if he didn't pay up.

Dinal attended £48,000-a-year Whitgift School in Croydon, south London, and was a talented rugby and football player. He hoped to study at Cambridge after getting straight A*s in all his GCSEs.

Dinal took his own life in October 2022, a matter of days after returning from a family trip to Mallorca during autumn half-term.

He left his home at 2am and died around an hour later. The Times reported that the blackmailer is believed to have come from Nigeria.

Olamide Shanu, a Nigerian national, is accused of playing a role in an international blackmailing scam. He was apprehended and arrested by police in Surrey at the end of 2023, and is set to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on May 28.

The alleged extorter is also wanted in the US on charges which include conspiracy to cyberstalk, interstate communications with intent to commit extortion and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The US Secret Service has claimed that Shanu and other actors used false online profiles with pictures of attractive women to lure young boys into sharing explicit images of themselves.

The victims were threatened and blackmailed into making payments either through cryptocurrency or using gift cards.

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