Green Bay Reporter

Winnebago County authorities are doing all they can to make sure Jordan DeMay’s death is not vain.

The 17-year-old Upper Michigan teen recently took his own life after being the victim of blackmail in a case that’s bringing the practice of so-called "sextortion" to light.

According to Fox 11 News, shortly before his death, Marquette investigators believe DeMay was being extorted through Instagram over pictures that he had taken of himself. Investigators said the scheme involved DeMay being pressured by his tormentor for money in exchange for the pictures not being sent to his family and Instagram followers.

“You know, that cycle of victimization, where that fear is so embedded in you that they are going to distribute those pictures,” Michael Sewall, internet crimes against children investigator for the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office, told Fox 11 News. “It can push people to the brink.”

Experts say sextortion is now on the rise, with predators often preying on young children and teens.

“We believe that children are sending more explicit images simply because they’ve been locked down for the last two years,” Ret. Lt. Joe Laramie, program manager for the National Criminal Justice Training Center at Fox Valley Technical College, told Fox 11 News.

Laramie said DeMay sent the money that was demanded from him, but in the end, it wasn’t enough.

“It’s never going to be enough,” Laramie said. “If you send more images, you send more money, whatever it is, it’s never going to be enough. They’re always going to ask for more.”

More often than not, Sewall said the threats made by the tormentors like the one who targeted DeMay are empty ones.

“If they fail the first time, they won’t actually do anything about it. All they want is that threat,” Sewell said, according to Fox 11 News. “They stir up that fear hormone inside people and they say, ‘I’m gonna post it to your friends and your family,’ and they give them a list of all the websites they're going to use, and they’ll send screenshots of maybe things that they’ve [the victims] already sent to them and say, ‘This is what I’m going to use and send to people.’ But a lot of times, they actually don’t end up sending it out to anyone.”

Even as this sort of crime is becoming more widespread, authorities said finding the perpetrators can be tricky because oftentimes they aren’t even in the U.S.

“A lot of our cases actually end up in, you know, Africa and different countries, and that can be very difficult, especially for a local agency,” Sewall said.

On the flip side, Laramie said many of the victims -- about 60% -- know who the offender is.

“Just because you know someone doesn’t mean that they aren’t a risk to sending your images to others,” Laramie told Fox 11 News.

A homecoming king and a member of his high school football team, DeMay seemed to have everything going for him, but in the minds of teens, experts warn that suicide can be viewed as a permanent solution to what they may not realize is a temporary issue.

“For one, the impulsivity, something happens tragic or something that we feel is really impactful, and so it’s that, ‘I don’t know how to handle it,’” Barb Bigalke, founder and executive director of Kaukauna’s Center for Suicide Awareness, told Fox 11 News. “You still gotta remember – they’re kids. They don’t have the same logical skills of going, ‘Well, let’s see, I should maybe talk with somebody.’”