An Irish gay man based in Dublin has been targeted by an extortionist on Grindr, who blackmailed him and shared intimate images without his consent. After the incident, the man spoke to GCN about the experience, warning about increased cases and calling for additional caution from the community.

As explained on An Garda Síochána’s website, sextortion is a form of cyber extortion where the perpetrator threatens to share their targets’ intimate information or images without consent, often for financial gain. People of any age, gender, sexual orientation, background, qualification, profession or personal circumstances have been targeted in such crime.

Apps like Grindr were created to offer a safe space for the community and to connect with other members. However, in recent years, the number of people who fall victim to extortionists on Grindr has been rising exponentially.

An Irish gay man, who wishes to remain anonymous and will be referred to as MC in this piece, has spoken to GCN about being targeted by an extortionist on Grindr last week. He explained how the blackmailer had “created the ability to appear like he was in Dublin” in the app, using the username Billie Joe.

“There are obvious bots on Grindr and you can always spot them,” the man said. “But this person engaged with me in a conversation that was really believable. He was saying that he was working from home and he was based in the Liberties. And that he was looking for a date that evening.

“The very fact that he referred to the Liberties made me think, ‘Oh, he’s legit.’ It was very local, very vernacular, the way he phrased it,” the man explained.

He recalled chatting for a few hours until the person asked if they could have his phone number and move to WhatsApp, and then eventually Telegram. “That’s when the extortion started. I went onto Telegram, and he had sent me this really sinister message. He said, ‘Do you wanna see a video?’”

The video was a recording of a computer screen with the Irish man’s private album on Grindr, containing explicit pictures, and his Facebook profile. “He was flicking through the pictures of my face and then the pictures of my nudes. And then he panned the camera or the phone that he was using to take the video over to the other side of his screen, where on the desktop was my Facebook profile,” MC said.

The extortionist then started to make threats, saying that they would send the video to MC’s friends, family and colleagues if he didn’t pay. The person had managed to find several family members on Facebook by looking for people with MC’s surname.

“He’s gone onto my Facebook profile, found my surname, found from my friends list all the people who have the same surname as me, and threatened to send this message to them. Then he started messaging me directly again,” MC explained.

“I blocked him at that moment. And then I went back to Grindr to get some screenshots of the conversation there,” the Irish gay man said, explaining that he found an additional message on the app with more threats.

“I went to the local Garda station and reported it all there,” MC said. “They were very honest with me in saying that they have recorded a spike in this and this isn’t the first time that this has happened and been reported to the local Garda station. They’ve noted a spike even locally here in South Dublin.

“I was impressed with how the police spoke to me about it. They were very reassuring in telling me that this isn’t an anomaly, that other people have dealt with it before, and that they’ve dealt with it before.”

Gardaí created an order for Grindr to release the user details of the extortionist based on the username. However, they also explained that “they have no jurisdiction over Grindr because they’re not based in Ireland and then they warned me that there’s absolutely no recourse at all for Telegram, that they’re based in Russia,” MC explained.

The day after he made the report, MC found out that the extortionist had shared some of his images on his brother’s Facebook profile. “It turns out my brother, unknowingly to him, had settings on his posts that anybody could comment on them. So this guy commented, even though he wasn’t a friend of my brother, and he was able to post images of me and my nudes and my Facebook profile.”

“He made good on his threat. He actually did it,” MC said. “The next day I went back to the police station and reported that development. They expressed that that’s not terrible news because they do have jurisdiction over Meta. They can put in a request to Meta for them to reveal the user details.”

While he had a positive experience while reporting the incident to the Gardaí, there hasn’t been any development since. “I was at the police station last Monday and last Tuesday, and I haven’t had an update from anyone yet. Not from Meta, not from Grindr, not from the police,” the Irish gay man said.

Reflecting on the emotional toll that being targeted has had on him, MC shared: “It’s indescribable. To go from, ‘Oh, brilliant. I’m going to have a date with this hot, sexy guy this evening’, to then open up my message in Telegram to see what’s really happening.

“I know in cheap films they show the room spinning as a sort of stupid effect, but that is literally what happened, the room span. I didn’t actually get sick, but I became so nauseous. It was like being seasick or something like that. It was a really strange feeling, like falling.”

MC recalled how he tried to rationalise what happened, but the feeling wouldn’t go away. “There’s nothing there that’s really going to harm me seriously, but I couldn’t shake just the insidiousness of being targeted in that way and just how vulnerable it made me.

“I wasn’t able to meet anyone physically. Luckily, I was able to work and I actually found working a good distraction. But I was supposed to go out and meet people for drinks or meet people for lunch or coffee. I had to cancel all of that.

“For the next few days, I just stayed in my house and one day there was a knock at my door. I jumped out of my skin. The room spin happened again. The sense of falling happened again. So then I cautiously came downstairs and I opened the door and it was just Amazon delivering a parcel.”

“I just feel really vulnerable. And all of that bad shit, all of that bad energy, I feel I need to put into doing something positive, which is tell the story and get an alert out,” MC said. “What I started thinking is, ‘How many other people is this happening to? People who don’t have the resilience that I have or don’t have the privilege of being able to laugh about it.”

Speaking about the extortionist, he said: “He was taking 20 minutes, half an hour to reply to each message, which I’ve realised that’s because he was chatting to lots of other people.”

“They could realistically be talking to a hundred people in Dublin. This one person,” he said. “They could get all of the information that they needed to move a portion of those hundred people into an extortion situation.”

“This is a live threat to the community. There are people who are, as we speak, being extorted. They could be your neighbour, they could be your friend, they could be your colleague. This is happening right now.”

To find out what to do if you’re a target of sextortion, read more on the dedicated An Garda Síochána page.