Mariana van Zeller

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.

They make money that way or work at clubs or...

And a lot of them lost their jobs during COVID and they had no government assistance.

And so they found a way to make some money this way by sextorting Americans.