MISSOULA - We're familiar with the terms blackmail, extortion, or even revenge porn.
But now, there’s something called sextortion — a very real and sometimes deadly scam aimed at teenagers through social media. They’re tricked into sharing naked photos of themselves with someone they believe to be in an online relationship with.
Once they do, the scammers say they’re going to post those photos unless they get money. The scam is so dangerous that even the FBI has issued a warning about it.
We sat down with a dad from Huson whose teenage son got so trapped in the scammer's web that he did the unthinkable. Jason Scheffer wants people to know what happened, so it won’t happen to someone else.
“Waylon was definitely a different breed. He was special. And I knew it from the time he was born. I thought, wow, look what I got,” said Jason.
Sixteen-year-old Waylon Scheffer was a popular high school student in Huson, somebody who loved what all Montana kids do — hunting, his truck, his family. But on December 14, 2022, this young life came to a tragic end.
“It was a normal morning and that’s one thing I'm really happy about. In this house, you never went to bed or left the house without saying ‘I love you, have a great day.’ I had three minutes to see what was going through his head,” Jason recalled. “I saw that his truck was gone, and I knew something is not right.”
Waylon drove up Nine Mile and took his own life.
“I knew something backed him into a corner. It just took a month to find out what it really was. He didn’t want to do what he did,” Jason told MTN News.
Waylon was being blackmailed in a scam called sextortion. It’s often aimed at teenagers — a crime that Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen explained to MTN News.
“What we see — and what sextortion — is someone online typically posing as a peer or posing as someone who is romantically or sexually interested in another young person will get explicit photos and then they’ll turn around and try to blackmail them.”
We met with Brian Cassidy who is a computer crimes agent with the Montana Department of Justice in Helena who told us that since September of 2022, he’s had 49 emergency calls for Montana kids in crisis over this scam.
“They tell them we're going to post this to your school, to your community. ‘We're going to send this to the college you said you applied for and it's going to ruin your life going forward or have to send us some money’,” Cassidy explained.
Jason believes in the hours before he died, Waylon’s online ‘relationship’ suddenly flipped, turning sinister and that he was immediately trapped by foreign blackmailers. That is when the 16-year-old started to panic.
"Basically, they threatened him to the point — they basically said ‘Hey, we’re sending them out one by one’,” Jason said. “He thought that everything was out there so before he drove up Nine Mile to do his business, he deleted his phone. There was no text messages, no Apps. Nothing.
Waylon isn’t the only one caught in this deadly web. Google “sextortion” and a tragic story emerges of dozens of teens who have chosen to die presumably so embarrassed or shamed.
“They don’t care about anyone else’s life. I wish they had a different heart. They’re to the point where kids have said ‘Hey, I'm going to kill myself if you keep bugging me.’ And they say go ahead, ‘your life’s already over’,” Jason said.
“These people, it’s their job. They go to work 10 hours a day, in their space with their laptop and build fake profiles and they aim them at certain ages,” Cassidy noted.
“All I had to do was get his phone and send those guys a nice little selfie with a middle finger and it would have been over. Over,”Jason said.
We asked Jason why he decided to share this painful story with us. He says it’s so others are aware of this menacing crime against kids and how we can all help them because Jason is confident that right now, someone else is in trouble.
“It's the only way I can avenge it. Honestly, It’s one way — it’s good medicine. It’s the only way I feel I am doing something for him,” Jason said. "People need to talk about it. You can't say enough about it. You cannot spread the word enough. Our kids are so naive.”
People can submit a tip to The Montana Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (MICACTF) at 406-444-6681 or visiting https://mticac.org/contact-program-coordinator/.
Online resources about sextortion include:
- National Crisis Hotline - Call 988 or text 4HOPE to 741741 or visit https://www.crisistextline.org/ for access to a trained counselor.
- THORN - Text THORN 741741 for access to a trained counselor or visit https://www.stopsextortion.com/.
- Request victim and/or family support at gethelp@ncmec.org.
- National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/sextortion#overview.
- Montana Department of Justice - https://dojmt.gov/sextortion/.
Waylon’s photos were never posted, and the scammers continued to message him even after he died. The FBI is now investigating.
Here is what you need to know if this has happened to you: You are not in trouble for sending those photos. You are a victim of a crime and you need to tell someone. In fact, the Montana Legislature recently approved another forensic examiner to help investigate these cases in our state.
