Facebook criminal law scam – attorney consultation for clients seeking lawyers advice.

I consulted with a 20 year old man and his father in my New Brunswick NJ law office recently. They’ve used me as their lawyer in the past for a variety of matters. Attorney damage control – criminal law/juvenile consultation. Someone “friended’ him on Facebook. She messages him and they have a dialog. It turns sexual. Over time she suggests Skype. She is very sexy and alluring. Eventually they Skype. She engages in sexual activity and encourages him to do the same. He does. She is filming Skype with a separate camera. She then sends him a message, “listen to me very well, remain calm or I will mail the video to your family:..” She has friended at least 20 of his friends and family at this point. She then writes, ” remain quiet or I will ruin your life – you respond quickly to my questions” and she demands a money wire transfer in exchange for deleting the video. She now has a videotape of him masturbating, and she captions it with his name and the comment ” …. porn with a young girl.” While I am looking at his Facebook page a notice appears that this person has become friends with another man, and then another and another. I look at one of those men’s Facebook pages and he has a high executive position at a major corporation, with seemingly no relationship to her. I track him down, explain who I am and as we are talking she messages him, you look sexy. Meanwhile she messages my client demanding he wire sums into an offshore account. She has his job information and contacts, his schools, his life. I contacted the Prosecutors Office regarding a criminal case and then engaged in damage control. With his Father here, we decided she can embarrass him, but she can not ruin his life. He must allow that consequence, and he wont. He will endure the mistake and the embarrassment, but the sooner he allows himself the right to have been conned, and to have made this mistake, his life will move forward. We draft a reply to her, carefully, and she never posted the video, seemingly moving on to other targets. It appears she is in Europe, and the local Middlesex County, New Jersey Prosecutors in New Brunswick do not pursue this criminal case. When I was young you made a friend not by a click of a button, but by support, togetherness and a deep connection. Facebook may have changed the definition of the word friend. Be very careful.