Nigerian Sextortion Rings Are Using Black Magic Rituals to Bless Scams That Have Killed at Least 40 American Teen Boys

A cybercrime researcher says he watched a Nigerian witch doctor slaughter a live goose and pour its blood over a photograph of an American porn star, part of a ritual meant to bless an active sextortion scam targeting a real teenage boy in Wisconsin.

Paul Raffile documented the scene in a Lagos shantytown, according to the New York Post. Inside a cardboard-and-steel shack littered with potions and talismans, the witch doctor scrawled the names of the victim and a fake online persona called "Lucy" onto charms, supposedly to "fuse their souls together" and make the con work.

Raffile and Erin West, a former prosecutor, didn't stumble onto this by accident. They built a fake Instagram account posing as an American teen to lure scammers in, the Post reported. Within days, a dozen West African accounts had reached out. One scammer took the bait, and using cyber tricks hidden in a crypto payment, Raffile and West traced his exact location and captured a photo taken from his own phone camera. That led to a trip to Nigeria and a documentary released online this month.

How the scam actually works

The scheme follows a repeatable pattern. Networks of scammers, overwhelmingly young men based in Nigeria or neighboring West African countries, flood American teen boys with fake accounts on social media posing as flirtatious female peers, according to Raffile. Once a target engages, the scammer coerces him into sending explicit photos, then demands payment through Cash App or gift cards to keep the images private. The first payment is rarely the last.

The UK's National Crime Agency describes the same mechanics, labeling it "Financially Motivated Sexual Extortion." The NCA says the crime is usually run by organized criminal gangs based overseas and that teenage males aged 14 to 17, along with male adults 18 to 30, are the primary targets. That matches the demographic pattern researchers are seeing in the US.

The speed is what makes this different from other forms of online exploitation. Embarrassed teens have been found dead within hours of first contact. Bryce Tate, a 15-year-old from West Virginia, took his own life in his father's garage last November, roughly two hours after a suspected Nigerian scammer first messaged him, according to the Post.

The numbers, as far as they're known

The US State Department has tied sextortion scams to at least 40 teenage deaths in the US since 2021. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told the Post it receives close to 100 reports of financial sextortion daily, roughly 33,000 a year since 2021.

The FBI reported $33.5 million taken from Americans in sextortion scams in 2024. That figure is almost certainly an undercount. Shame keeps most victims and families from reporting the crime at all, which researchers and the NCA both flag as the central obstacle to knowing the true scale of the problem.

Nigeria's role in this ecosystem isn't disputed by any source here. Overall internet scam losses from the US hit $16 billion in 2024, with extortion and cyber fraud at the top of the list, per the Post's reporting. Oludayo Tade, a sociology professor cited in that reporting, has studied the Nigerian scam networks directly, though the full scope of his findings on why these networks operate the way they do wasn't detailed.

What's proven, what's not

The black magic ritual itself is documented on video by Raffile, an eyewitness account, not a secondhand claim. Whether the ritual actually influences outcomes is unfalsifiable and beside the point. What matters is that scammers believe it works, or at least market it that way to reassure clients paying for the "service." The underlying extortion operation is real, organized, and has killed American kids.

The NCA's public guidance treats this strictly as a criminal justice and victim-support problem. It urges victims not to blame themselves, notes they've been "tricked or deceived," and directs people in crisis to emergency services. It does not speculate about ritual practices, staying narrowly focused on victim support and the criminal gang structure behind the scams.

What's next

No US federal charges tied to this specific Wisconsin case or the Lagos scammer identified by Raffile and West have been reported. The documentary the pair released is aimed at exposing the scam networks publicly rather than serving as a law enforcement action itself.

The open question is whether US platforms, Meta and others where these fake accounts originate, and payment services like Cash App face any regulatory pressure to close the gaps scammers are exploiting. No specific legislative or platform response was detailed in the reporting reviewed here, leaving parents largely dependent on awareness campaigns from NCMEC and the NCA rather than a systemic fix.