Inside the Queen of Sextortion's honey trap HQ

[Wayne]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -them.html

Inside the sleazy Filipino internet den where 'Queen of Sextortion' arrested over British teen's suicide 'made fortune duping men into stripping for cybersex and then blackmailing them'
Maria Cecilia Caparas-Regalachuelo, 37, was 'head of Manila sextortion gang'
Group suspected of using girls as young as 12 to target victims online
The alleged scam has been blamed for suicide of British teenager Daniel Perry
Caparas comes from North Hills village, one of Manila's worst slums
Her new home, complete with gym and pool table, was honey trap for children
It was allegedly used as HQ for the scam which involved blackmailing victims

The suspected mastermind behind a global internet sex scam that caused the suicide of a British teenager is a rich former slum dweller from the Philippines known as the Queen of Sextortion, Mail Online has discovered.
Single mother Maria Cecilia Caparas-Regalachuelo – who just 10 years ago lived in one of Manila's worst areas – is the alleged matriarch of a syndicate in the northern Philippines that has blackmailed thousands of foreigners after taking naked videos of them during online sex chats.
Using a Fagin's band of urchins including girls as young as 12, Caparas is believed to have amassed a fortune by getting her gang members to threaten to post naked footage of victims on Facebook after persuading them to strip.

Her rabble of unlikely cyber-criminals in flip-flops working from dirt-poor towns and villages in the Bulacan province north of Manila, in the Philippines, is blamed for the suicide of 17-year-old Daniel Perry from Dumfermline in Scotland.
The trainee mechanic thought he was chatting online to a girl in the US and was told by his online tormentors he would be 'better off dead' as they demanded money shortly before he leapt to his death from the Forth Road Bridge in 2013.
Caparas, 37, was arrested with dozens of other gang members in a 2014 Interpol swoop following Daniel's death.
She is suspected to have used her wealth and connections to bribe her way out of prison and continue her sextortion racket before being arrested again this September.
She is now in custody awaiting trial for child abuse and trafficking while one of her 22-year-old gang members, Archie Gian Tolin, has since gone into hiding in the Philippines, evading his extradition to Britain over Daniel's death.
Her gang's activities are thought to have contributed to a surge in 'sextortion' cases in Britain with four more suicides in the past year and a doubling of reported cases from 385 in 2015 to 864 so far this year.

The Slumdog Millionairess – described by one neighbour as uneducated but extremely cunning – is thought to be the pioneer of the sinister form of online blackmail dramatised in the TV series Black Mirror and now used by other gangs based in Morocco and the Ivory Coast.
MailOnline tracked down the home of Caparas to a remote village called North Hills, north of Manila, where her home was guarded by a ragamuffin band of young men who hid their faces from our cameras.
Ironically, Caparas presents herself as a deeply religious woman despite the appalling crimes she is accused of.
She has a crucifix on her front door and when arrested in September wore a t-shirt with the slogan: 'In the happy moments, praise God. In the difficult moments, seek God.'
Caparas was relocated to North Hills with her four children when the Manila slum where they lived was demolished 10 years ago.
She is now the wealthiest and most powerful resident of the village of 1,000 people, according to neighbours.

She owns a sprawling two-storey block dominating the village centre which has been converted in the past five years into a honey-trap for local youngsters with a basketball ring opposite its entrance and a gym and a billiards room on its upper floors.
The billiards room is lined with 19 cyber-café style coin-operated computer cubicles and is thought to have been the unlikely headquarters of her criminal enterprise, recruiting English-speaking youngsters to seduce and blackmail foreign men online.
As we entered the billiards hall, young men playing pool hurriedly covered their faces and scuttled awkwardly away, refusing to answer any questions about Caparas.
They then locked the hall and hurried off into the village, leaving only a gaggle of grubby young children behind.
All computer hard drives were seized when police from the Manila-based Cybercrime unit swooped in September, residents told us.
They also arrested a nephew of Caparas, Mark Andrey Rafol Sesaldo, who is accused of helping her run the Cybercrime network.
Incredibly, despite her two high-profile arrests, which have seen her nicknamed the 'Queen of Sextortion' by local newspapers, village leaders claim to know little about her activities and have taken no follow-up action to warn parents or youngsters about her alleged operations.

'Everyone knows what happened but no one will talk to you about it,' said the owner of a café near her home, who asked not to be named.
'She is in jail but this is the Philippines and she has money. We all believe she will be free and back home soon once the fuss has died down.'
Asked if village parents were concerned about the activities at her house, the café owner said: 'This is a poor village and many people made money from Caparas – not just the young people but their parents as well.'
When she was arrested, Caparas protested that she was just a businesswoman and pointed out that she had just opened a bottled water shop on the ground floor of her home in North Hills. 'I hope the police will treat me fairly,' she told a local TV crew.
Luzviminda Espiritu, chairwoman of the neighbourhood or 'barangay' committee, told Mail Online Caparas had been penniless when she moved to North Hills with her children 10 years ago after being relocated from a Manila slum.
'She was given a simple home here when she arrived but she has since gone on to become a successful businesswoman,' she said.
'We don't know much about what she does and we were very shocked when she was arrested.
'We haven't had a single complaint brought to us by parents of children. We have many homes in this barangay. Our police officers patrol every day but they can't always see what goes on inside people's houses.

The billiards hall where the computer terminals were found was set up by Caparas four years ago, Ms Espiritu said. However local police knew nothing of her activities, she said, and Caparas was arrested both times by the Manila-based national anti-cybercrime squad.
After her 2014 arrest, police said they believed Caparas's syndicate had extorted an estimated £1.5million from thousands of victims in the US, Britain, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
There were nearly 500 victims in Hong Kong alone who paid the gang more than a combined £400,000. Individual amounts transferred by victims ranged from £200 to £15,000, police found.
Youngsters working for Caparas allegedly worked in three days shifts making contacts with foreigners and then persuading them to strip and perform sex acts in front of their computers which were then recorded and used to blackmail them.
Interpol revealed how children working for the gang, which operated at an 'almost industrial scale', would be offered training and incentives including 'holidays, cash or mobile phones for reaching their financial targets'.
They could earn hundreds of pounds in a week shift, police said – a fortune in a rural area where the average daily wage is £5 a day and the main employer is a cement factory in the nearby town of San Jose Del Monte.
One underage girl was allegedly paid more than £1,000 for three days of 'chatting' work online luring paedophiles for Caparas's syndicate to blackmail.

As well as her home village, police believe Caparas ran another sextortion gang in San Jose Del Monte. One of her daughters allegedly owned two Western Union money-transfer offices in the district where victims were ordered to send their blackmail money.
Caparas is accused of setting up her money-spinning internet sex scams by taking advantage of the Philippines' high standards of English in the poverty-racked district where groups of unsupervised children run wild.
Other victims of sextortion gangs in the Philippines include 52-year-old Chicago politician Ron Sandack who stepped down abruptly after paying US$3,000 to blackmailers. He went to police when his blackmailers demanded a further US$5,000, state documents show.
Senior Superintendent Ronaldo De Jesus, head of the Philippines National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group which arrested Caparas, told Mail Online many foreign victims who thought they were talking to women online were unwittingly exchanging messages with teenage men.
Showing a surprising level of sophistication, syndicate members engage men in sex talk then show pre-recorded videos of women stripping and performing sex acts before persuading victims to do the same so they can record their acts.
If they refuse to pay up, the blackmailers sometimes threaten to tell friends and family members the victim was performing sex acts with an underage boy or girl even if the victim believed he was communicating with someone older.
'It is a growing crime here in the Philippines and it is driven by poverty,' said Snr Supt De Jesus who has a team of 100 Manila-based officers working with Interpol to tackle the sextortion epidemic. But new sextortion gangs are springing up in provinces nationwide, he said.

Snr Supt De Jesus said the most harrowing part of his team's work was seeing underage children sometimes as young as eight forced to take part in the cybersex industry by their parents. 'It is very hard to understand how any parent can do this to their child,' he said.
Caparas has been charged with child abuse and trafficking – charges that relate to her use of underage children to blackmail foreign victims. Underage girls were allegedly used in some cases as bait and in others as a way to threaten victims when blackmail demands are not met.
Snr Supt De Jesus insisted that Caparas would remain behind bars until her case is brought to trial, saying the offences she was charged with are so serious. 'She will not be given bail,' he said.
An international arrest warrant was issued in February for Archie Gian Tolin, one of three gang members accused of targeting Daniel Perry. He was among 58 people including Caparas arrested in 2014.

Daniel's uncle, Ron Reilly, who owns a garage in Edinburgh, said: 'All online companies must have some form of panic button.
'You're not going to get a 15-16 year old boy or girl that's going to want to tell you what they're up to, no chance.
'If there was a panic button, Facebook can look at what's being said on that conversation and say 'what's being said here is illegal.
Daniel's uncle Ron Reilly told MailOnline: 'If Daniel had come to me and said what happened I would've probably laughed it off'

Daniel's uncle Ron Reilly told MailOnline: 'If Daniel had come to me and said what happened I would've probably laughed it off'
'They can then run the conversation - in my case it would be them pretending they were Daniel - to try and get the information they need for prosecution.
'For what it costs and for what Facebook actually earns, to set something up and protect people, its nothing. It only has to save one life to make it worth it.'
Mr Reilly said the family were being kept up to date with the investigation in the Philippines and attempts to extradite suspects back to UK.
'Extortion is massive. The kids in the Philippines are definitely getting exploited too but we're now getting more and more aware of it.
'What the family ideally want is something set up so it can't happen to somebody else.
'We were really lucky we at least knew why Daniel killed himself. If we hadn't found that laptop that night, we would be thinking what have we been doing wrong, was it your fault, was it yours?
'People that lose somebody and have no idea why they do it, it must be ten times worse because you will blame each other.
'Having your 17-year-old nephew who you seen the day before, who was full of life and being his usual cheeky self, thrown himself of the Forth Road Bridge is just, you question why.
'Nothing is worth killing yourself over, nothing can be that embarrassing it's worth that.
'If Daniel had come to me and said what happened I would've probably laughed it off. I think if he had gone to anyone and explained it, he wouldn't have done what he did.'