SAN JOSE, Calif. — Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 to connect with a trained counselor or visit the NSPL site.
Ryan Last received a message on a school night in February from someone he believed to be a girl.
Within hours, the 17-year-old, straight-A student and Boy Scout had died by suicide, CNN reported.
“Somebody reached out to him pretending to be a girl, and they started a conversation,” his mother, Pauline Stuart, told CNN, fighting back tears as she described what happened to her son days after she and Ryan had finished visiting several colleges he was considering attending after graduating high school.
The online conversation quickly grew intimate, and then turned criminal.
The scammer — posing as a young girl — sent Ryan a nude photo and then asked Ryan to share an explicit image of himself in return. Immediately after Ryan shared an intimate photo of his own, the cybercriminal demanded $5,000, threatening to make the photo public and send it to Ryan’s family and friends.
Quick poll. Civics test:
1.Sexploitation has (increased \decreased) by the advent of the internet?
2. More crime has been ( enabled\circumvented) by the people’s use of the database driven infrastructure?
Here is an interesting USE of the database by a guy known as whistling diesel on Youtube. COPS GOT FIRED! We did a similar things as kids except it was 83 horses in the school’s parking lot. We planned that stunt for three weeks!
Such a tragic, sad situation….. made worse that these young folks don’t know what to do or how to handle their embarrassment, gullibility, feelings of being tricked & trapped, etc., so they make rash and terrible choices. 😩
Very, very sad. 😟😔
(I certainly hope the FBI or whoever can trace the messages back to the scammer and charge him with homicide or manslaughter.)
so, so sad, tricking as bad as cops setting up sting ops but he/she takes their own life not seeing a way out! what a loss of life. sad, bad internet usage. why doesn’t FBI task force catch these 18,000 annual scammers causing death.
I hope past SJ Rez/Boardmember saw this horrible LOSS of another Bay Area Scout via Suicide. Bad enough donating to Trevor Project for LGBTQ+ suidical youth for life as I lost x4 of my Old Baldy (E.LA) Council now disolved due to 288 charges of leadership over decades ago. THIS IS more tragic. Guys trying to figure out their blossoming sexuality (nor all Gay) into their mid twenties due to maturing under tight constraints in this world not knowing that 17&under you DON’t share nor dicuss anything with in the matter chosen, knowledgable of that girl or not. Minor is a MINOR.
So sad and for a burden on the minor girl as she reaches adulthood for the rest of her life what happened to the person on the other end of their phone, Loss of Life fearing being out of embarrasinment, ridicule THE Near LIFETIME Label AND most likely Prison not ounty Jail for a long tenur unexpected for such an act of pornography w/Minor. Fear of friends parents family finding. He could only see RUINS NO Light at a dark dark tunnel of the unknown. When your a guy@19-24 Hormones are still raging and you don’t think clear, you do impulsive actions and many ,MANY Scenarios run through your head and turns them to very possibly REALITY and seeing the ONLY WY OUT is goodbye world. I hope better education & Prevention can be created before more lives are impressionabled and destroyed to the non living choice. Prevention.
When I was on Twitter, I became friends with a girl in the UK, and a girl in the Philippines. Before I deleted my account, I installed the Kik app on my phone so I could stay in contact with them. Recently, I have had a couple occasions where a “girl” contacts me on the app and sends a revealing photo and asks for one in return. I’m aware of many types of scams, so in instances where photos are involved, I run a reverse image search using Yandex reverse image search. It’s a Russian search engine that’s a thousand times better than Google image search and will reveal pictures that Google quite often cannot find.
Long story short, I had a random person send me a revealing pic and asked me to send one in return. A search revealed the pic was from a European porn site so my suspicion that the person was a fraud was confirmed. Just to mess with them, I downloaded and sent a picture back and within minutes, the person tried to extort me for money. I called them out on it but they apparently didn’t understand I knew what they were up to. I normally don’t engage with scammers but now and then I get bored and will play along with them. Kik is a very useful free texting app, but some recent additions to it has brought in a lot of bot accounts trying to lure guys to “pay to play” websites and it’s getting annoying, and if it wasn’t for the fact that there are no data charges involved for my friends to talk to me I would just delete it.
I wish there was a way to spread the word to teens about reverse image searches when they receive revealing photos from “girls”, because it would not only save them from a lot of headache, it could also save their life. Unfortunately, most younger guys do not think rationally and are not suspicious when a “girl” sends them a nude photo. With the internet being used more and more in schools, I think internet safety should be a mandatory class.