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Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health problems, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 (or 800-273-8255) for training. Please contact your counselor. Or visit the Lifeline site.
Gavin Guffey sent a message to his brother and friends before dawn on July 27 last year. It was short and incomprehensible. It had a heart-shaped love symbol – <3 – on a black background.
A few minutes later, in a hallway bathroom a few steps away, the 17-year-old shot himself. His father, Brandon Guffey, said he heard a loud bang when he was at his home in Rock Hill, South Carolina. It sounded like someone hitting a bowling ball on the floor.
When I rushed to the bathroom, I found my eldest son bleeding on the floor between the bathtub and the toilet.
For weeks, the grieving family searched for any traces of what they had missed. It was later discovered that a scammer, posing as a young woman, had sent nude pictures of Gavin and requested similar images of himself. When Gavin shared the photo, he was threatened with publishing the photo unless he paid.
Courtesy of Brandon Guffey
Gavin Guffey had just graduated from high school when he died by suicide last July.
Gavin was an unwitting victim of sexual extortion, or “sextortion.” The FBI warns that the crime increasingly targets underage juveniles. Federal officials said sextortion cases had increased over the past year in a recent safety alert issued in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The incident has contributed to an alarming number of suicides nationwide, Alert said.
At the time of her son’s death, Guffey, 43, was running for state House of Representatives. Six months later, after winning the election, he was sworn in as president. His first job was to introduce a state bill criminalizing the type of fraud that led to his son’s death.
His fellow congressmen passed the bill unanimously last month. With a tearful Guffey watching from the Senate floor, state senators passed the bill Thursday, dubbing it “Gavin’s Law.”
Under the law, fraudsters who blackmail minors or adults at risk are subject to up to five years in prison for first offenses.
Lawmakers will soon send the bill to Gov. Henry McMaster for his signature.
Guffy and his wife Melissa have spent months unraveling the mystery surrounding their son’s death.
Weeks after the funeral, scammers flooded Guffy and her 16-year-old son, Cohen, with Instagram messages demanding money in exchange for nude photos. On August 20th, when Gavin would have turned 18, a message in Guffy’s Instagram inbox infuriated him.
“It said, ‘You said your son begged for your life,’ with a smiling emoji,” Guffey said. Law enforcement officials told him not to comply, but he said he did his best to ignore it. He believes the scammers went through Gavin’s friends list on social media and messaged everyone with a similar last name, including Guffey’s nephew.
Courtesy of Brandon Guffey
A bill criminalizing sextortion by South Carolina Rep. Brandon Guffey is awaiting the governor’s signature after being passed by the state House and Senate.
The family did not have access to Gavin’s computer and iPad, but investigators obtained them as part of an investigation into his death, Guffey said. Using messages from the scammers and information shared by investigators, he began piecing together his son’s final days. He found that scammers used a vanish mode feature that deleted messages as soon as the recipient ended the chat.
“They used disappearing messages, so kids can feel safe using technology. That’s it,” he says.
Gavin used Venmo to wire the scammers $25 (all the money in his account) and begged for more time.
“He told them not to send these images because they would get more money…they didn’t care,” Guffey said. “I think it was just too much in his mind and he didn’t know how to get over it.”
An FBI spokesperson in Columbia, South Carolina, said in an email to CNN that no arrests have been made in the case. He declined to provide additional information, citing an ongoing investigation.
Sextortion plots mostly occur online.
Federal officials say law enforcement received more than 7,000 reports related to online sextortion of minors in 2022. Nearly half of them were victims, most of them boys. More than a dozen sextortion victims have died by suicide, according to the FBI.
Predators commonly trick young male victims into believing they are talking to girls their own age, persuade them to send them explicit photos and videos, and threaten to release the images unless paid. increase.
Youth and child psychiatry expert Dr. Karl Fleischer says young people are more impulsive because they don’t weigh risks and consequences in the same way adults do. . Their judgment and decision-making abilities are underdeveloped because the brain’s executive control center, the prefrontal cortex, doesn’t fully develop until their mid-twenties, Fleischer said.
Courtesy of Brandon Guffey
Gavin Guffey loved skating and cartoons.
“The crime begins with young people believing they are communicating with someone their age who they are romantically interested in…” the FBI says. “The shame, fear and confusion that children feel when caught in this cycle often prevents them from seeking help or reporting abuse.”
On its website, the FBI is reminding teens that scammers are preying on their fears. They are not committing a crime, so I urged them to report sextortion.
Sextortion scams are getting more and more headlines nationally. But law enforcement is fighting back.
U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, Mark Totten, announced earlier this month that he would extradite three men from Nigeria on suspicion of blackmailing a teenage boy. One of them will be charged with killing Jordan DeMay, 17, who committed suicide in March 2022 as a result of sextortion.
And in December, Los Angeles police arrested a suspect in the case of 17-year-old Ryan Last, who committed suicide in San Jose, Calif., in February 2022, hours after falling victim to a similar sextortion scam.
Guffy is well aware that sextortion takes a toll on families. Nearly a year later, he’s still grappling with what happened at his home that morning.
He remembered cradling his son in the bathroom, thinking he had fallen and hit his head. He remembers glancing at the pistol on the floor and smelling gunpowder. He says he will never forget the pain and confusion he felt when he learned his son died by suicide.
“I was a basket case. I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “My first thought was that it was my fault, I forgot to draw the gun.”
Gavin loved skating and art, and would put stickers of dinosaurs and his favorite characters, Spider-Man and Deadpool on the dashboard of his car.
The day he died, a package arrived in the mail addressed to him. Gavin had ordered a flag with the face of rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, on a black and gold background. It read, “Don’t step on you.”
Guffy remembers and laughs.
“Gavin always teased me. I’m a pretty conservative person, but Gavin was more of a liberal kid,” he says. “But I always encourage my kids to think for themselves and be their own people. As long as they think, that’s what matters most.”
His office is flagged. This is a conversation starter and always leads to discussions about his son and the danger sextortion scams pose to teens.
Guffey explains that sextortion is a lucrative crime that attracts international and local scammers alike.
“If you can blackmail 10 teenage boys who say nothing for $100 each and do it all with one image you get from a girl, that’s pretty easy,” he says. “And teenage boys aren’t necessarily thinking every time they see attention[from a girl].”
Guffey briefly considered resigning from the state legislature to hunt down fraudsters.
“My wife said, ‘Absolutely not.’ You are one of the few people with a voice that can really go out and make a difference,” he says. “And at that point, I had to make a decision. Is it more important to focus my efforts on finding the person responsible for my son’s death?” Is it more important to keep the family out of this pain? ”
He made the latter a major part of his legislative programme. He has his son’s last message tattooed on his left arm. Whenever his fellow congressmen signed a bill, he gave them lapel pins with similar symbols.
Courtesy of Brandon Guffey
Gavin Guffey’s friends spray-painted pictures of dinosaurs, the symbol <3, and his nickname Goop on rocks at his favorite skate park.
On days when Gaffy needed a boost, he climbed into Gavin’s white van. He wore sneakers with black stripes and Spider-Man graffiti, and he felt like he could do anything.
“I feel like he (Gavin) wants me to save more children so that I don’t have to go through what he felt at the time,” he says. .
Guffey’s aim, he said, is to make sextortion scammers think twice before targeting children in South Carolina.
At Gavin’s funeral, his friends put stickers of his favorite cartoon characters on his coffin. Also, they went to his favorite skate park and spray-painted rocks with dinosaurs and <3 symbols, as well as a message to other young people, "Tomorrow Needs You."
Guffey says he wants teens to remember the message whenever they face challenges.
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