Monday, 9 December 2024, 16:03
There was no gang or felony organisation behind it — simply the arms and abilities of a 26-year-old woman armed with a cell phone, a photograph enhancing app, and the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Utilizing these instruments, she created a fictitious picture of herself and offered it on social media with an “unreal physique” that captivated over 300 men, who she is alleged to have ‘sextorted’. Nonetheless, she has now been arrested.
The police operation, dubbed ‘curvas’ (curves), started in Malaga. Officers from the cybercrime part of the provincial police headquarters obtained the primary two complaints that pointed to the identical woman, so that they started an investigation centered on figuring out the individual behind the set-ups and sexual extortion.
After gaining the belief of the men who contacted her, the younger woman would then extort them to acquire sexually compromising pictures or movies and threaten to ship the photographs to their household and acquaintances if they didn’t make a sequence of funds by financial institution switch.
Following the arrest of the suspect in a small city in Guipúzcoa (País Vasco), cyber officers discovered that she had extorted money from not less than 311 men all through Spain. The variety of victims was deduced from the funds made to the suspect’s financial institution accounts. The switch descriptions included phrases like “fee for settlement to cease menace” or “delete, please”. Nonetheless, many of the victims haven’t reported the assaults for varied private causes.
Investigators from the cybercrime part in Malaga, who had been joined by their counterparts in San Sebastian, analysed all of the accounts managed by the suspect on social media networks. In one among them alone she had more than 13,000 followers, which demonstrated the “promoting exercise of recruiting and establishing contacts with men”. The picture of the detainee was comparable in age and facial options to the one which appeared within the reported profiles, however not her physique, which had undergone a significant transformation by means of using artificial intelligence.
When enough proof was obtained, the court docket authorised the entry and search of her residence. No refined laptop tools was present in the home, however a smartphone with a number of artificial intelligence-based graphic retouching functions put in and a tripod with a light-weight ring to document herself.
Subsequently, an information dump of the seized system was carried out on the police station. Officers analysed 3,500 conversations by means of totally different messaging functions and social media networks, which confirmed an evolution over time of the modus operandi used by the extortionist.
In accordance to the investigation, at first she pretended to be a prostitute, urging men to rent her companies upfront, after paying through Bizum, however by no means exhibiting up on the agreed location. Later, she allegedly inspired her followers to be part of a personal channel with clear sexual content material through an prompt messaging utility, which turned out to be one other rip-off.
On the similar time, the accounts the place the victims paid the money from the ‘sextortion’ had been analysed. In eight months, she obtained a complete of 16,300 euros from her illicit enterprise.