Sextortion of Pasion.com users

Monday, 22 February 2021

Pasion.com is one of the most important dating and sexual contact platforms in our country. The wide range of categories it offers (you can contact women, gays, transsexuals, lesbians, travel companions, liberal couples ...) and its design and ease of search have made it a whole reference website among people who seek to hire the services of a prostitute through the internet.

Some of these people, however, have had to go through a bad drink: that of having been victims of what is known by the name of sextortion. The main news portals in the country, from abc.es to elmundo.es, passing through 20minutos.es, libertaddigital.com ,vanaguardia.com, elconfidencial.com have talked about this in recent months, at one time or another. , publico.es, elespanol.com, huffingtonpost.es or elpais.com.

A trickle of complaints in different parts of the country (Teruel, Palencia, Zaragoza ...) made one suspect a few months ago that what was being reported revealed the existence of a plot specialized in sexual blackmail. All the complainants who had taken the step of approaching a police station spoke of having been blackmailed after having tried to contact an advertiser on the contact website Pasion.com, although there have also been cases in Slumi , NuevoLoquo and other types of notice boards. Ads with hardly any controls.

Modus operandi of sextortion

The method used by the criminals was simple: they inserted false advertisements on Pasion.com and, from them, they obtained the phone numbers of their victims. With them, the extortionists could initiate their work of sexual blackmail. Either through WhatsApp, or through phone calls, they threatened the blackmailed users of Pasion.com with disclosing their identity as prostitution users to their direct relatives. At times, they even resorted to physical threat in their extortionary work. To avoid both, the blackmailed had to pay a certain amount of money to their extortionists.

The fact that the extortion did not commonly end with this payment and that a spiral of threats and claims for money was commonly entered, led some affected to bring the case to the attention of the Civil Guard.

Investigations carried out by the State Security Forces and Corps revealed several groups of sextortionists who, more or less directly connected to each other and operating from Valencia, had carried out a massive sextortion campaign that affected men from all over Spain .

According to the investigation by the Benemérita, this network specialized in sexual extortion used what is known as 'mules' to collect from its victims. All of them were people from a very specific Valencian neighborhood and they were all related to the world of poverty. These people, in exchange for money, offered their names to appear as holders of the bank accounts in which the victims of sextortion had to deposit their money.

After this case centered in the province of Valencia, others related directly to the crime of sexual blackmail have emerged. In September of last year, for example, four people were arrested (two in Granada, one in Marbella and one in Valencia) accused of carrying out sextortion practices .

In this case, the victims were 22 people and the criminals' method of action was similar to that already described. In this case, after publishing the false advertisements on some erotic contact website, the criminals posed as hitmen for an organization dedicated to pimping and accused their victims of having molested the alleged prostitutes without hiring their services. In this case, the members of the group sent their victims photographs and videos in which hooded people appeared displaying firearms. By sending this graphic material, the criminals tried to intimidate their victims in order to push them to pay the requested money.

Several complaints filed in various police stations in the country revealed the existence of this plot. The collaboration between the National Police Corps and the Mossos d'Esquadra allowed the dismantling of this plot.

Pasion.com

The importance of personal control

All these cases that we have talked about have put into question the security and respect for the privacy of the users of web pages of contacts with prostitutes such as Pasion.com, Nuevoloquo.com , Mileroticos.com , Hott.es or Slumi .com among innumerable websites of this style.

Undoubtedly, there are many users who use these pages on a daily basis in our country and not all of them have suffered sextortion. In most cases, clients looking for prostitutes can do so from the information that these websites provide with the peace of mind of effectively contacting the chosen girl. But the risk that this is not the case certainly always exists. Why? Because the method of operation of these websites is not strict enough to guarantee the accuracy of the ads.

The fact that advertisers can publish ads in them automatically without passing a personal control of them allows the insertion of false ads. Sometimes, such fraudulent insertion only has the objective, on the part of the advertiser, of appearing to be sexier or more beautiful than it really is. In others, such as those cited above, serve as bait to attract potential victims of erotic blackmail. Both in some cases and in others, the user of the web ends up being harmed to a greater or lesser degree.

The possibility of this occurring forces us to highlight the qualitative difference between those contact pages in which the control of the advertisements and photos published in said advertisements is carried out personally and those in which such control does not exist. In this sense, the work of a professional specialized in the control of sexual advertisements that are intended to be published on a website is essential. This professional is in charge of ensuring that the ads correspond to real girls who are looking for clients and that these girls are also the ones who appear in the photos and are exactly as they appear in them. This quality guarantee reverts directly to the peace of mind of the user, who can thus contact the desired girl feeling safe from extortion such as those described here.

It goes without saying that our website girlsmadrid.com is completely safe since our controls are extremely demanding and in addition to asking advertisers for selfies with a specific text, we call before activating an ad to check that everything is correct. We do not like fraud and we have been fighting against it for many years and that is why we limit the number of advertisements published so that our users in the city of Madrid do not encounter surprises when they contact an escort.

Slumi