The BBC documentary sees reporter Tir Dhondy travels to a nondescript call centre where the scammers are chillingly matter-of-fact about those they harm
Warning: This story contains details that may be distressing for some
Review
Blackmailed: The Sextortion Killers
Four Corners, ABC iView / BBC 3
Rating: ★★★★☆
"I have your nudes and everything needed to ruin your life."
The message that led to the end of 16-year-old Evan Boettler’s life is more than a moment of online horror. It’s a window into the moral economy of our time.
In October, the BBC released the documentary Blackmailed: The Sextortion Killers, in which reporter Tir Dhondy travels from the grief-stricken stillness of rural Missouri to the hurried backstreets of Lagos city central, revealing a world where empathy is increasingly priced out.
Sextortion is the act of extorting sexual images for money and there’s been a dramatic surge in this crime in recent years. The documentary investigates the issue and makes the audience confront the systems that allow these practices to occur in the first place.
The investigation begins in the Boettler family’s home, where Evan’s parents, Kari and Brad, recall the night their son received a Snapchat message from someone posing as a teenage girl.
Just ninety minutes later, he took his own life.
Nearly a year on, their search for justice faces seemingly endless bureaucratic obstacles. Social media companies like Meta and Snapchat refuse to release identifying data on the perpetrator without a court order and, despite the evidence, the FBI has made little to no progress.
Dhondy’s focus isn’t on this family’s heartbreak but on how their loss demonstrates a divide in perception where the perpetrators assume that people from traditionally wealthier countries face no hardships.
When Dhondy goes to Lagos, she is in search of a group known locally as ‘Yahoo Boys’, with the idea that the person responsible for Evan's death belongs to this group. The people she finds are poor, uneducated, and raised in a world where Western wealth parades constantly through their phone screens.
When Dhondy challenges one scammer, Ola, about the lives being ruined by these sorts of scams, his answer is chillingly matter of fact:
"I don’t feel bad. I need the money," he says.
Ola’s detachment isn’t born from ignorance but from a world that has taught him Western lives are abstract and therefore expendable. To him, Evan wasn’t a child but one of many usernames in a system that rewards ruthlessness.
When Dhondy enters a "Hustle Kingdom" in Lagos, a room full of scammers hunched over glowing laptops, the sound is eerily similar to what you might hear at any office in the Sydney CBD. Phones vibrating, keyboards tapping, mild cheers breaking out when someone pays. It looks less like a crime scene and more like a workplace. That normalcy is what makes it so disturbing.
The deeper question that Dhondy raises, sometimes explicitly but mostly in her silence, is how empathy gets erased in this transaction. Each person involved in these schemes, from the leaders to the ones hitting the send button, has rationalised their role.
This is true even inside companies like Meta who see millions of cases like Evans’ every day. Former engineering director-turned-whistleblower Arturo Bejar testified to US Congress in 2023 that the social media company ignored repeated warnings about the dangers children face on its platforms.
"They [Meta] don’t know what to do when kids are in harm," he says.
The indifference at both ends of the power spectrum here feels tragically symmetrical.
What Blackmailed captures so effectively is the banality of cruelty in a networked age. Dhondy never needs to moralise, the images and actions speak for themselves. The documentary’s power lies in its restraint. It doesn’t provide the catharsis that many viewers, myself included, will be seeking at the end. The trail goes cold and the grief of the parents doesn’t end.
What’s unusual about Dhondy’s approach is that it doesn’t become voyeuristic in the way many true crime storytellers often do. Instead, the film’s impact is felt by the focus on contrasts: Missouri’s snowbound quiet against Lagos’s humid noise; a grieving mother’s tremor against a scammer’s stone face.
Still, the documentary isn’t flawless. Its pacing can drag at times and Dhondy’s detached narration, while admirably restrained, sometimes flattens the severity and urgency the documentary tries to convey. The film walks an ethical tightrope between observing suffering and sensationalising it, which can leave viewers uncertain whether to feel outrage or despair at the end.
Watching it, I felt less horror and more numb recognition.
This documentary goes beyond a true crime investigation and acts as a sociological mirror. It forces viewers to ask how a generation learned to value profit over pain and how easily the rest of us learnt not to care.
Blackmailed: The Sextortion Killers is streaming now on ABC iView, Four Corners
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