Police have warned that men who masturbate during video calls may leave themselves open to blackmail by gangs using phoney profile photos of beautiful women.
Quite a few Thai males, both children and adults, had already fallen prey to these gangs, Pol Col Siriwat Deephor, deputy chief of the Technology Crime Suppression Division (TCSD), said on Tuesday.
The gangs used bogus photos of attractive women in their profiles and sent friend requests to potential victims on social media. After they became online friends, the chats would become sexually oriented and eventually the victims would be enticed into turning on their camera and then masturbating during a video call.
The gangs recorded the videos and used them to blackmail the victims, the TCSD spokesman said.
If the victims refused to pay, the gangs would threaten to send the masturbation videos to their friends or family, or to make them public online.
Normally, the gangsters concentrated on extorting money from their victims and did not publish the videos. However, recently some videos had been disseminated even though the victims had paid the money. This caused damage to the victims, Pol Col Siriwat said.
He advised men not to masturbate during any video call or send such videos or photos to anyone.
People with information about the operations of these gangs could alert police via https://tcsd.go.th around the clock, he said.