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  • 18/04/2024
In their first interview, the parents of a sixteen-year-old boy who took his own life just hours after he was blackmailed by a scammer have told ITV News their "whole world has been shattered". Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane was contacted on social media by someone claiming to be a young girl but was actually a scammer, who tricked him into sending an intimate image and then blackmailed him with it. Sextortion, is when intimate images and/or videos are recorded and used for financial exploitation and coercion. It is mostly committed by organised criminal gangs overseas. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Transcript
00:00 Those criminals killed our son.
00:02 They can't just be anonymous people behind a keyboard thousands of miles away.
00:08 There has to be consequences.
00:09 The thought that they were going to share this with all his contacts
00:12 would have felt like they hit the end of his world.
00:15 But it wouldn't have been, even if they had done that,
00:18 it wouldn't have been the end of his world.
00:19 We'd have got over it, we'd have helped him through it.
00:21 The platforms that these criminals are using need to up their safeguarding,
00:28 up their protection for young people.
00:30 If this is happening to you, that is your absolute route out of it.
00:34 Just switch the phone off and walk away from it.
00:37 Go and get help.
00:38 Go and get help, yeah.
00:40 I wish Muz had done that.
00:42 Neither.

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