Modern technology is making life better and creepier at the same time.
Extortion, of all crimes, is going through a major change right before our eyes.
Kevin Christopher Bollaert, a 27-year-old from San Diego, was arrested this week and charged with 31 counts, including identity theft and extortion.
His crime? He created a web site and urged people to send in "revenge porn."
Revenge porn is what happens when you have a society in which digital cameras are embedded in pretty much every device, from your laptop to your phone to your washing machine.
Young and dumb and in love, people send one another sexy self-taken photos. Then the relationship goes sour and (usually) the guy turns out to be a jerk. He posts naked photos of his ex online.
For the angry ex-lovers, revenge is the point. But some crooks realized they could turn a profit by creating websites storing lots and lots and lots of user generated revenge porn photos. Bollaert ran such a site, ugotposted.com, and he made about $900 a month in advertising. But prosecutors say that's not where he was making his real money. He allegedly set up a parallel site called changemyreputation.com. For a fee of $299 to $350, this site would get your picture taken off of ugotposted. com.
The pitch to the victims is that the sites are unrelated, but the prosecution alleges they were both run by the same guy, making this outright extortion, if true.
Sadly, this isn't a new scheme. There have been at least a couple of others like it in the past few years.
Obviously, this is a horrible experience for the victims, who have their real names and social media contact information linked to their images.
This is done for maximum humiliation, so that when their relatives or prospective employers Google the names, they find nude pictures.
Of course, it could be worse.
The last major distributed extortion scheme in North America went by the name of the Black Hand.
Different sources will give you differing accounts of the Black Hand, with some claiming it was an actual secret society, a forerunner of the Mafia. But in New York and Chicago, at the turn of the 19th century, it was a crime anyone could try.
Typically, recent Italian immigrants would get a letter with a threat, and a demand to pay up. Or else.
If they didn't pay, then they might be beaten, their shop or home burned, they might even be killed.
Today, Black Hand tactics would be difficult to pull off. Email can be tracked, physical mail can be forensically analyzed. Drop something in a mail slot and you're likely on security camera.
Around the turn of the century, police were adding things like fingerprints and mug shots to their arsenal of investigative tools.
They could use telephone and telegraph to compare notes with other investigators, they could use cars to rush to the scenes of crimes.
As police investigation and response times improved, largely thanks to technology, the Black Hand threat evaporated.
It became harder and harder to get away with anonymous violence. Your photo was in a book at the police station, your car's licence plate number was on record.
But it became easier and easier to transmit images and information, first text, then images, then video, finally leading us to today's modern version of the ancient crime.
It's based on shame, not violence, but that's small comfort for the victims.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter at the Langley Advance.
