Death shows dark side of the internet - Price of extortion
Ronan Hughes, 17, from Co Tyrone, was found dead on Friday. It is thought he took his own life after being duped into posting images of himself on the internet.
According to Geraldine Donnelly, the principal at St Joseph’s Grammar School in Donaghmore which he attended, Ronan was being blackmailed by foreign criminals into giving them money.
“This is something different and even more sinister than online or cyberbullying and I think it’s important that message gets out to young people and gets out to parents and gets out to teachers,” she told the BBC.
“What we’re possibly looking at is some international element, of Ronan having been targeted from abroad purely to extort and blackmail him for money.”
Investigating officers from the PSNI the criminal element very seriously and have admitted that blackmailing is “a definite line of inquiry”.
If so, this raises the stakes considerably for teenagers everywhere whose second home is the internet and who are used to taking ‘selfies’ and other forms of photos of themselves and their friends and posting them online.
Such activities appear to be all great fun, but there is a dark side to the internet as well, particularly when technology allows high definition photos and videos to be posted online.
Young people may be internet natives — as distinct from their parents who tend to be internet tourists — but that does not mean they are savvy enough to realise that criminals will use every means available to them to extract money from innocent people.
In France, the number of internet blackmail cases has become particularly acute. According to the BBC, Frenchmen using social networking and online dating sites are being targeted by fraudsters posing as attractive young women. French police say there are gangs located in the Ivory Coast that specialise in this kind of criminal practice. One 28-year-old man who posted a compromising video online was blackmailed for €500, an amount that escalated once he paid.
Is it any wonder, then, that a teenager should find himself traumatised after being blackmailed?
Parents, gardaí and the wider community need to be aware that this form of criminality is right on our doorstep and is likely to grow. It is important to heed the words of parish priest Fr Benny Lee who officiated at Ronan’s funeral Mass.
“Somewhere in the big world, perhaps very far from Clonoe, there’s a man, or a woman, or a gang, who are guilty of a terrible crime,” he told mourners. “They exploited him and they broke him, and if they could do that to such a sensible fella as Ronan, they could do that to anyone.”
This wasn’t just a case of cyberbullying. It wasn’t simply a question of internet extortion.
Ronan Hughes’s death was murder by proxy.
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