Mariana van Zeller

And it's mainly targeting teens, which is really sad, American teenagers.

And then once you do send those photos or videos, the person says, well, I have all the contact information on Facebook of all your friends and your work and your parents and your school, whatever, and I'm going to send this to everyone if you don't send us money right now.

And the really sad part of that is that we spent time with parents whose kids committed suicide.

And within the span of like a couple of days.

So they started chatting online.

There was this kid called Jake in Utah.

So sad.

Was contacted by what looked like a beautiful girl on a Sunday night.

By Thursday or Friday, he committed suicide because he was too embarrassed that his friends and his family would see those photos.

It is horrible.

But amazingly, he left behind a letter for his mother and instructions on how to access his phone so she could see what had happened to him and also who he had sent money to in the hopes that she would be able to investigate or send people to investigate.

And the American authorities did.

They found that the people that he was sending money to were in the Philippines, but that was it.

There was nothing else they could do because it was a foreign country.

And so we set out to the Philippines and tried to figure out who it was behind this scam.

And we found the whole community of people involved in the scam and scamming millions out of Americans.

Yeah, stock photos of girls.

A lot of them, interestingly enough, are actually trans people.

In the trans community, we spoke to a drag queen, for example, who was scamming a lot of people.

And during COVID, what happened is that they usually do drag queen contests.