Nigerian sextortion blackmailer who allegedly made £2m from victims to appear in UK court

Mr Olamide Shanu, a Nigerian man is set to be arraigned in a court in the United Kingdom (UK) for allegedly threatening to publish compromising photos and videos of teenage boys.

The sextortion blackmailer is believed to have made up to £2 million by threatening his victims.

The 33-year-old will appear in court in London later this month after an extradition request from the United States.

According to UK Times, Shanu allegedly posed online as a teenage girl, to try and cajole boys to send him sexually explicit material of themselves.

He would then threaten to send the material to the victims’ family, friends or even the media, if they refused to pay him whatever amount of money he demanded.

At least three UK schoolchildren have committed suicide as a result of being blackmailed over sexually compromising materials.

One of the victims had set up a payment plan with Shanu, paying him £240 a week, until the blackmailer had received almost £8,000.

Shanu’s cryptocurrency account is believed to have received more than 6,000 payments over three years, leading investigators to estimate the number of victims to be in the hundreds.

He is accused of being involved in an international blackmail scam.

The Nigerian born notorious scammer was apprehended in Surrey at the end of last year and is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on May 28.

Also, the blackmailer is wanted in the US on charges including conspiracy to cyberstalk, interstate communications with intent to commit extortion and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The US Secret Service has claimed that Shanu and other actors used false online profiles with pictures of attractive women to lure young boys into sharing explicit images of themselves.

The victims were threatened and blackmailed into making payments either through cryptocurrency or using gift cards.

The payments were all traced to an account in Binance, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, which was opened using Shanu’s passport as proof of identity along with an address in Lagos.

By the time the account was traced, it had been emptied of $2.6 million-worth of bitcoin amassed in the previous three years.

Luke Lack, a Secret Service special agent, wrote in the criminal complaint that the Binance account had received funds from victims of various frauds, including sextortion and romance scams.