- The problem of “eWhoring” is growing, as crooks find that they can make easy money through it.
- Victims of the growing sub-culture are highly unlikely ever to discover how their nudes are being exploited.
- Actors protect the private material from leaking to public sources, as this is in their best interest.
There’s a rising problem with stolen nudes of women being used to trick hundreds and even thousands in romance scams. Known as “eWhoring,” it is making good money for all the links of the chain, and it's growing in proportions pretty quickly.
First, there are those who are stealing the images, and these people could be computer technicians taking “backups” or hackers compromising accounts or even the computers of other unsuspecting people. Then there are sellers of the packs who are distributing the material to a large number of actors, and finally, these actors are making money by tricking the so-called "sugar-daddies."
These actors need to use stolen images and keep the primary victims, the depicted women, unaware of the fact. The simple reason for this is that the secondary victims, the “catfished” individuals, are bound to run a reverse Google image search, so these packs cannot comprise scraped images from social media or anything openly available and indexed by search engines.
As we can see in a recent post on a popular hacking forum, this material is offered under very clear prepositions, which is to help other users of the forum make money by scamming people. Even if the sets aren’t ideal, the “eWhoring” is still possible by claiming reasons of privacy or hesitation. The main thing is to use stuff that is private, and of course, aesthetically convincing.
As a victim of this sub-culture told Cosmopolitan recently, she suffered a mental meltdown when she discovered actors were trading her images for gain. As she characteristically stated: “Every time I meet someone, the first thing I think of is whether or not they've seen my images.”
As she discovered in the process of her personal investigation, one of those traders was making around £500 a week and was nowhere close to the stereotypical idea of your average cyber-criminal - just a personable and quite likable young rapper who was looking to make some easy money online.
This tells us that anyone could be engaging in eWhoring, and there’s not much that the police can do about it really because it is very rarely discovered and reported to them. These actors take every precaution to hide their real identities, as well as to protect the nudes they hold from leaking to public spaces.
And so the responsibility to protect yourself lies on you, and you alone. Do not trust people with your data or devices, do not download software from ambiguous sources, and do not upload content on subscription-based content platforms like ‘OnlyFans.’ People who pay to access your content there may copy it and use it for eWhoring - and oftentimes, this is exactly what happens.