For five days a desperate San Diego State University student emailed and messaged Snapchat pleading for the company to disable her hacked account. A cyber-criminal had posted nude photos she had privately sent her boyfriend via the app, and demanded payment to stop.
"I just felt really hopeless," says the student, a 21-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area who asked to remain anonymous. "There was nothing I could do but hope Snapchat would respond."
The hacker was not an acquaintance seeking revenge, but a cyber-criminal demanding she send him $100 online.
Snapchat asked the student to fill out a form, which she says she did, then she "checked my email every 10 minutes to see if they would respond." But for five days Snapchat never took action, she said. She says she called the police, who also said they couldn't help.
On Wednesday, a half-hour after being contacted by Business Insider for this story, Snapchat informed the student it had disabled the student's account, and her nightmare came to an end.
The company said it responded quickly in the case of the student, taking down the nudes and disabling the account. The company says the student did not follow instructions to authenticate her account, which is a crucial step in ensuring that the person seeking support is actually the owner, and that delayed action. The student disputes this, and showed Business Insider multiple emails in which she pleaded for help.
Snapchat, whose parent company Snap, Inc. reported $2 billion in revenue over the past 12 months, and had a market cap of over $71 billion as of Friday afternoon, said in a statement:
"The privacy and safety of our Snapchat community is our top priority. We have put a number of measures in place to help Snapchatters protect their accounts from improper access, including by encouraging them to use two-factor authentication, set a complex and unique password and only accept friend requests from people they know in real life." The company provides tips for protecting Snapchat accounts, and guidance on dealing with a hacked account.
Online extortion is up generally during COVID, a spokesman for the FBI's San Francisco office told Business Insider, and the bureau warned of the trend in an April alert. The spokesman, who said the San Francisco FBI office is investigating cases of Snapchat sextortion, said the platform's young user base and their tendency to send each other revealing photos makes it a hotbed for the crime of sextortion.
"Those elements make Snapchat particularly vulnerable," the spokesman said.
Snapchat, for its part, says that it's taking steps to improve the situation.
"Exploitation of any kind, especially when it involves having private material shared, is unacceptable and we understand how difficult it can be," the company said in its statement. "While we have made progress in combating these types of online threats, we are constantly evaluating how this activity is evolving and where we can continue to improve, and we partner closely with safety experts on both."
The attacks are coming at an especially bad time
This year, the attacks have been especially traumatic at a time when many victims are already stressed.
Another San Diego State student, an 18-year-old from Ventura County, was hit by a hacker threatening to post nude photos from her private Snapchat messages in September, when she was isolated in quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19.
Exhausted, stressed, and alone, she says she gave up trying to get help from Snapchat after two days. She paid the hacker $50 to get her account back, according to screenshots of her payment to the hacker reviewed by Business Insider. Both of the students' identities are known to Business Insider.
"He was trying to blackmail me with my nudes," she says. "I was so scared." The student says she jumped at the chance to get control of her account back by paying the hacker because Snapchat was not helping her.
Snapchat says it warned the student that her account had been compromised, and she reacted by changing the email associated with it. But the student says that was the hacker changing her account to be under his email, which she says she made clear to Snapchat.
Experts call on Snapchat to move faster in addressing the problems
Experts say young people can be deeply traumatized by the personal violation of the crime – especially if they have to wait days for a hack to be resolved. The 21-year-old San Diego victim says her five-day wait for help was harrowing. "I'm still terrified."
The victims' desperation waiting for help leaves long-term impact, those experts say.
"It's difficult for people to understand the emotional and psychological trauma victims go through," says US Attorney Erica MacDonald of Minnesota, who has prosecuted Snapchat sextortion cases and presided over similar cases in a previous role as a district court judge. "Social media platforms have to prioritize these incidents for speed and show more social responsibility. It can happen, they just have to prioritize these kinds of complaints."
Other experts agree that a long, agonizing wait to resolve the issue takes a toll on victims.
"The psychological effects can last years," says Matt Ashburn, a former CIA and White House cybersecurity officer and expert on cybersecurity law enforcement and policy now working for the Silicon Valley cybersecurity company Authentic8. "These are especially egregious attacks on young people, and should be prioritized. The social media platforms should be more responsive."
Social media platforms must do better to help victims in the moment, according to McAfee fellow and chief scientist Raj Samani. "We have to start expecting better [service-level agreements] and responses to such issues urgently."
A former Snapchat employee who worked with law enforcement on crimes committed on the platform said the disputed claims and complicated responses are part of the problem. "Reporting sextortion on Snapchat "is complicated, and that makes it difficult for victims to get what they need." That person said Snapchat is "not being empathetic to the victims."
A 'heartbreaking' issue
US Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) called Snapchat "a child predator's dream" in 2019, citing a Massachusetts man charged months before in a sextortion case involving minors.
"Disappearing pictures, location-sharing, and limited parental controls make Snapchat a child predator's dream. Tech platforms have a responsibility to protect our next generation from falling victim to online predators and 'sextortion' blackmail schemes," Senator Blackburn told Business Insider on Friday.
Recent Snapchat sextortion cases have involved a New Jersey youth pastor charged with targeting teens, a hacker targeting multiple students at a New York university, a Kentucky policy officer arrested for the second time in Snapchat sextortion cases, a Florida man sentenced to 29 years for extorting teens, and a Virginia man sentenced to 50 years in prison for his role in a Snapchat sextortion ring exploiting children. The New Jersey and Florida cases also involved the use of Instagram.
A judge in the New Jersey case against the youth pastor called the teen-aged victims' situation "truly heartbreaking."
The company says it encourages "any parent of a Snapchat users to check out our educational resources and talk to their kids about account security, the importance of two factor authentication and how they can report an issue to us if they think their account has been compromised."
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