• 6 months ago
In their first interview, the parents of a sixteen-year-old boy who took his own life just hours after he was blackmailed by a scammer have told ITV News their "whole world has been shattered". Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane was contacted on social media by someone claiming to be a young girl but was actually a scammer, who tricked him into sending an intimate image and then blackmailed him with it. Sextortion, is when intimate images and/or videos are recorded and used for financial exploitation and coercion. It is mostly committed by organised criminal gangs overseas. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Transcript
00:00 In the evening we were just chatting and watching rubbish on telly and he went up to his room
00:04 as normal. It transpires he was contacted by somebody claiming to be a young girl.
00:12 That young girl was actually a scammer who tricked him into sharing an intimate image
00:17 and blackmailed him with it. Just hours after he'd become a victim of sextortion, Murray
00:22 took his own life.
00:23 I was sitting watching football and the next thing I heard, Ro was screaming, screams like
00:29 I've never heard in my life before. It was absolutely horrendous.
00:33 We were just a normal family of five to the next morning. We're down to four people with
00:38 a huge Murray shaped gap that's never going to go away.

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