Professional athletes are, particularly those in the NBA, about a sophisticated extortion scheme in which scammers create convincing fake social media accounts, often posing as Instagram models, to harvest explicit content and extort money.
While official reports have detailed various digital attacks against players, this specific tactic exploits the athletes’ high-profile digital interactions. The scammers operate by:
- Creating High-Quality Impersonation Accounts: The perpetrators use stolen photos and content to create seemingly legitimate accounts, often with large fake followings, that mimic attractive and well-known social media personalities or models.
- Initiating Contact: The fake accounts establish direct contact with NBA players and other celebrities via direct message, leading to flirtatious exchanges.
- Harvesting Sensitive Material: Once trust is established, the scammers push the conversation toward exchanging explicit photos or videos or just a simple FaceTime call.
- Extortion: After obtaining compromising material, the scammers reveal their true identities and threaten to leak the content to the public, media, or the player’s team unless a monetary payment—often thousands of dollars—is made. Even if no compromising material is received, they will manipulate the FaceTime call to make it seem the athlete was speaking to children in a sexually suggestive way.
Out the mud Podcast gives specific examples of this happening.
Though the names of all targeted players are rarely made public, the FBI and federal prosecutors have previously detailed related wire fraud and computer conspiracy cases involving criminals who gained access to the social media accounts of NFL and NBA players to sell the information or use explicit material for blackmail.
Authorities caution athletes to exercise extreme care when interacting with unverified or unfamiliar accounts, regardless of the user’s perceived celebrity status or follower count. The threat underscores the growing risks facing high-net-worth individuals from cybercriminals seeking to exploit their digital lives for financial gain.
Be safe out there.
