Gay blackmail

What’s the context?

LGBTQ+ victims blackmailed and overcome after falling for scammers on digital dating apps like Grindr in Kenya where gay sex is banned

Lawyers fight for justice in online extortion cases
Hundreds of cases reported last year, rights groups say
Social media, internet dating apps urged to have more safeguards

NAIROBI - Joe smiled nervously from behind his shades as he emerged from the cramped wood-panelled magistrate's court in Kenya's capital Nairobi.

The slim 24-year-old man, wearing black track pants and a grey hoodie, had just testified how he and his acquaintance had been lost and robbed by a man they had met on Facebook last year.

"The perpetrator and the three friends who attacked us reflection we wouldn't proceed to the police because we are gay," said Joe, who asked not to be identified by his valid name, as he stood outside Milimani Law Courts last month.

"If we are one of the first to try justice, maybe others will too," he said.

Kenya's LGBTQ+ society has long stayed silent about blackmail and extortion on platforms like Facebook and dating apps like Grindr, frightened of being outed and jailed themselves in a nation where gay sex can land you in ja

Russian Crime Gangs Discover Gays Easy Targets for Blackmail

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Criminal gangs in Russia, operating through queer dating sites, hold found a lucrative new blackmail target: homosexual men.

A St. Petersburg economist, one of their latest victims, said several men burst into the apartment where he was gathering his date. Claiming that his go out was under age, they threatened to call the police and to discharge a video they had secretly filmed unless he paid up.

The gay rights group Vykhod, or Coming Out, said they registered 12 such attacks in St. Petersburg in 2015 and at least six more gay men hold come to them so far this year. LGBT activists believe the actual number is far higher and express the attacks hold increased in the past two years.

Since homosexuality finds tiny acceptance in Russian society, many gays keep their sexual orientation hidden from their families, friends and co-workers. This makes them manageable extortion targets for criminals.

Vykhod spokeswoman Nika Yuryeva said most of the recent attacks have followed the same pattern as the one seen by the St. Petersburg economist.

Alexander Loza, a legal adviser at Positive Dialogue, an company that pro

Would threatening to reveal that someone is gay/bisexual calculate as blackmail?

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Blackmail

(1) Blackmailers' Charter

One of the more serious effects of social prejudice against homosexuals is that it makes them highly vulnerable to blackmail, particularly when the law itself supports such prejudice. Indeed, even the very existence of a subculture, however supportive in many ways, brought with it a disadvantageous noticeability, at least to the eyes of another subculture, the criminal underworld. Before the nineteenth century, blackmail usually denoted extortion, that is, theft or robbery accompanied by a threat of physical harm. The phrase "black mail" or "black money" in the Middle Ages referred to payments coerced by threat to existence, limb or property. Criminals, bandits, and highway robbers often banded together to practice this gentle of extortion, taking advantage of the disruptions within medieval world, and even government officials and justices of the peace often blackmailed people by threatening to arrest them.

The Elizabethan Behave of 1601 defined the