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A Delaware woman has been arrested for her alleged role in an international “sextortion” scheme that targeted thousands of victims across the US, Canada, and the UK.
According to the US Justice Department, 28-year-old Hadja Kone of Wilmington, Delaware, tried to pressure victims — many of them young men— into handing over millions.
Sextortion scams try to trick a person into producing nude images or sexual videos. The scammers will then threaten to release the nudes online or to family members unless the victim pays up. To pull this off, the culprits will often pretend to be an attractive young female on social media, reach out to prospective targets, including teen boys, and push them into producing sexually explicit material.
Kone's arrest illustrates the scale of such sextortion schemes. According to the Justice Department, Kone and her cohorts successfully extracted $1.7 million from their victims between May 2020 and December 2022.
Federal investigators add that Kone allegedly conspired with a 22-year-old from the Ivory Coast named Siaka Ouattara, who worked with others to pose “as young, attractive females online and initiated communications with thousands of potential victims, who were primarily young men and included minors.”
While impersonating the attractive women, Ouattara and others would send sexual photos and videos to entice their victims to do the same, including posing nude on live video chats. “Unbeknownst to the victims, during the web cam/live video chats, Ouattara and others surreptitiously recorded the victims as they exposed their genitals and/or engaged in sexual activity,” the Justice Department says.
The Justice Department didn’t say how it tracked down Ouattara and Kone. But the activities caught the attention of federal investigators, which led to the February arrest of Ouattara in the Ivory Coast. Now both Kone and Ouattara have been charged with making interstate threats, along with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking, money laundering, and wire fraud.
“If convicted, Kone and Ouattara each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each conspiracy count and money laundering count, and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each wire fraud count,” the Justice Department added.