Teen blackmail via Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg probably didn’t see this coming when he created Facebook.

A 15-year-old boy was arrested in an entrapment operation on a Manila campus for allegedly using the popular social networking site to blackmail an online “friend.”

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said the boy ordered a 15-year-old schoolmate to cough up P15,000—or else he would post the latter’s nude photo on Facebook.

In a report, the NBI’s Technical Investigation Division (TID) said the teenage suspect first posed as a girl using the alias “Yuri Kimberly” and befriended his schoolmate in March.

In his statement to the bureau, the complainant recalled that in one of their chats online, Kimberly asked him to send a nude photograph of himself.

After the picture was sent around first week of May, Kimberly allegedly threatened to spread the photo on the Internet and gave him until today, June 3, to give the money.

The complainant disclosed the threat to his parents, who then sought the help of the NBI. Investigators later discovered that Yuri Kimberly was actually a boy.

Kimberly’s instructions for the complainant to leave the money at a certain spot inside a campus in Binondo, Manila, made the NBI agents suspect that Kimberly was a student of that school.

The agents set up a trap on Thursday by placing surveillance cameras around the drop-off point. They then cornered Kimberly when he turned up at the place at around 6 p.m. to get the money which, as he instructed, was placed inside a notebook left by the complainant.

The boy admitted upon arrest that he was the Yuri Kimberly who befriended the complainant, the NBI-TID said.

He would be charged with extortion and violation of the Anti-Child Abuse Act, the NBI said.

The boy, however, was released to his parents pending the filing of charges on account of his being a minor, the agency added.