WARNING: Distressing content

Rohan’s story

On Saturday Rohan Cosgriff won best on ground playing footy.

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On Monday he was delighted that his dad, a horse trainer, had a winner at the track while he was at school.

On Tuesday, within hours of being blackmailed over an explicit photo on social media by an international criminal, Rohan Cosgriff was dead.

The boy from Ballarat with a beautiful smile and the brightest of futures had taken his own life; the victim of sextortion.

Speaking publicly about their son’s suicide wasn’t an easy decision for Beck and Anthony Cosgriff.

But as a family, they decided to share his story in the hope it could prevent a similar, senseless loss of life in Australia.

The night of July 26, 2022 will forever haunt them.

“I was on the computer just doing paperwork and bills and so on,” Anthony told 7NEWS Spotlight.

“Beck went to say goodnight to Rohan and came out and said, ‘Where’s Rohan?’ And I said, ‘Oh, he’s in his room.’

But their 17-year-old wasn’t there.

A search ensued; the house, the horse stables and a call to Rohan’s mobile.

His phone rang out.

“I was starting to get a bad feeling,” says Anthony.

“I thought I’ll just go over and check what we call the oval, which was the grassy area where we always played ball games next to the house.”

It was a dark, winter night in Ballarat and Anthony was wearing a head torch.

It was there he found his son’s body — Rohan had taken his own life.

“I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” says Anthony.

Until paramedics arrived Anthony tried everything he could, including CPR.

“They (paramedics) worked on him for a long time and we just sat in the car watching, just waiting until they said that they couldn’t get him back,” Beck says, tears streaming down her face.

It started raining.

“I went inside and I didn’t want Rohan to be cold, so I just grabbed his doona”.

“We had a pillow as well, and just put the pillow under his head and we just laid down with him in the rain and just patted his hair and told him we loved him,” sobs Anthony.

“But of course we were just saying: ‘Why? What’s happened? We don’t understand’.”

The following day, police found a note in Rohan’s bedroom.

It read, “I’m sorry. I’ve made a huge mistake. I love you all so much.”

“Obviously, we knew something had happened, but we didn’t know what the huge mistake was. That was all that was left for us,” says Anthony.

Their wait for answers, was agonising.

Two months after Rohan’s death, officers from Ballarat Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team finally gained access into his mobile phone after a friend remembered his password.

There, police discovered a series of devastating messages on social media accounts linked to Nigeria.

Rohan had been ‘befriended’ by a stranger pretending to be a girl on Instagram.

“And completely out of the blue, this person had sent an intimate photo of themselves and was pressuring Ro to send one back, very much an ‘I showed you mine, you show me yours now’ situation. He hadn’t wanted to, and then there was a lot of pressure on him to do it. Eventually, he did send a photo, and then it started from that point onwards,” Beck explains.

The sextortionist began blackmailing Rohan, demanding $1000 and threatening to send the photo to everyone he knew if he didn’t pay up.

“The police said that he told them, ‘I’m just 17. I’m a kid. This is illegal.’ That he did not have the money to pay any of it. And according to the policeman, the pressure that was put on him was immense. And that it was within an hour of him first being asked for money.”

The pressure only intensified.

“He was eventually told, ‘Right, now you’ve got half an hour until we ruin your life’,” Anthony says.

“And that was just before he took his life.”

Daniel’s story

Almost 15,000km away in Lagos, Nigeria, 7NEWS Spotlight meets with a sextortionist who introduces himself as “Daniel”.

But on social media, Daniel is a girl called Evelyn-Joanne.

The 21-year-old university student tries to justify his criminal behaviour by explaining the desperate situation of his country; where extreme poverty and lawlessness is rife and the internet search phrase “how to blackmail someone with pictures” is currently trending.

Daniel explains how he and his colleagues — cybercriminals known as Yahoo Boys — buy hacked, female Instagram accounts for a few Australian dollars.

They then “choose” their victims, mostly teenage boys aged 13-17 from developed, tech-savvy, “wealthy” countries such as Australia and the United States.

Daniel demonstrates how he uses a website called Fake Name Generator to produce a male, American name.

“Bobby Cannon” it suggests, randomly pulling a first and surname from the site’s database.

Daniel then copies and pastes that computer-generated name into an Instagram search, adding and directly messaging unsuspecting boys who appear in the results.

The chat usually starts with a simple: “Hello.”

It escalates fast.

“We just act as if you’re looking for a relationship or maybe just sex chats because most of them like sex chat,” he says.

Within hours of building a rapport with his victim, Daniel (aka Evelyn-Joanne) starts sending explicit, female photos taken from adult websites, encouraging the boy on the other side of the screen to send a naked photo in return.

Once they do, the blackmail begins.

“Now I’ll tell him that if he not pay $100 that I’m going to post the nude. I’ll send it to all his family members, all his friends, everybody,” says Daniel.

This Nigerian scammer knows the boys are terrified.

“They’ll be begging you, ‘Please don’t post a nude’.”

But he claims he didn’t think about the deadly consequences of his crime, until now.

Before meeting Daniel in Lagos, 7NEWS Spotlight spoke to him on Zoom, sharing the tragic stories of Rohan Cosgriff and several American victims who also took their own lives after being sextorted on Instagram.

Daniel claims that knowledge made him stop.

“That got me scared, very scared ... I don’t want a dead body to be on my head”.

It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth.

The investigations

The investigation into Rohan Cosgriff’s death in July 2022 has been led by Victoria Police, which alerted the Australian Federal Police in October 2022 but never made an official referral.

The AFP says it has never been the investigating agency responsible for leading the case.

In a statement on April 10, 2024, Victoria Police told 7NEWS Spotlight that after Rohan’s death: “Victoria Police liaised with stakeholders Meta to analyse social media and shared information with AFP. While the social media accounts were identified as linked to Nigeria, there were limited avenues of inquiry to identify suspects.”

That’s where the investigation ended, with no details of Rohan’s case passed onto Nigerian authorities.

However, in a revised statement on April 17, 2024, Victoria Police said: “Following additional telecommunication data being received by Victoria Police late last year, Victoria Police on April 12, 2024 provided this case information to the ACCCE (Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation) and they are undertaking further assessment of the matter.”

“The further crucial technical data ... is still being analysed as part of the current investigation.”

It’s unclear why Victoria Police took more than four months to forward the new data to the AFP-led ACCCE.

And still, almost two years since his tragic death, no details of Rohan Cosgriff’s case have been passed on to Nigerian authorities by Australian law enforcement.

However, 7NEWS Spotlight provided information about the 17-year-old to the head of Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre, Commissioner Uche Ifeanyi Henry when we met in the country’s capital Abuja in February. He has opened an official investigation but requires further details from Australian authorities.

“What I can promise you, is that we’re going to do justice to this. I’ve received it and we’re going to work on it and you’re going to get a good result” he told us.

Sextortion cases are extremely complex but not impossible to solve.

ACCCE Commander Helen Schneider told 7NEWS Spotlight: “We do a lot of work in the prevention and awareness space to tackle sextortion. It’s important for families to know that we’re across this issue, we’re working on it.”

“I think, for us, it is challenging obviously when offenders are located offshore.”

Australian authorities did have success earlier this year, with the arrest of two Nigerian men linked to the 2023 sextortion death of a boy from NSW.

State police worked with the AFP, FBI and local officers, tracing the men to Lagos.

Former FBI Agent Jim Tarasca was the head of the agency in Michigan in the United States when local teenager Jordan DeMay shot himself in March 2022 after also being sextorted on Instagram.

Jim promised the 17-year-old’s family that he would track down the criminals responsible.

“It’s a big promise, but it’s one we kept,” he told 7NEWS Spotlight.

Following “digital breadcrumbs” and liaising with law enforcement partners in Nigeria, the FBI eventually located the two men who had been posing on Instagram as a girl called “Dani Robertts” after buying several hacked accounts.

In August 2023, brothers Samuel and Samson Ogoshi were extradited to the United States. Earlier this month they pleaded guilty to “conspiring to sexually exploit teenage boys” after targeting Jordan and up to 130 other young men online around the world.

The Ogoshis are yet to be sentenced but are facing up to 30 years behind bars in the United States.

“It sends a message hopefully to perpetrators, that you can’t sit behind a keyboard half a world away and get away with it,” says Jim.

“We will come after you with everything we have, we will find you, and we will bring you to justice”.

The tech giants

Everyone interviewed by 7NEWS Spotlight as part of our global investigation agrees that tech giants could and should do more to prevent sextortion on their platforms.

South Carolina State House Representative Brandon Guffey is suing Instagram’s parent company Meta for wrongful death, gross negligence and other claims, adamant it’s not doing enough to protect children from online predators.

Guffey’s 17-year-old son Gavin shot himself after being sextorted on July 27 2022.

In a devastating coincidence, his death happened just one day after Rohan Cosgriff’s, on the other side of the world.

Guffey holds Meta 100 per cent responsible for what happened to his son.

“We’ve seen other companies that shut down entire profiles just for sending child pornography, but yet they allow this to transfer, they’re storing it on their servers” he says.

“If I’m housing cocaine, I can’t say, ‘Well, it’s not mine. I was just holding it on my property.’ But that’s what they’re doing with child pornography.”

7NEWS Spotlight requested an interview with head of Instagram Adam Mosseri but Meta “politely declined” citing Mosseri’s travel schedule.

No one else was offered as an alternative.

This month Meta announced new features to help protect young people from sextortion and intimate image abuse.

“We’ll soon start testing our new nudity protection feature in Instagram DMs, which blurs images detected as containing nudity and encourages people to think twice before sending nude images,” it said in a blog post.

The feature will be turned on by default for teens under 18 globally – but they can still turn it off.

Take the shame away

Beck and Anthony Cosgriff believe the traditional message to teenagers of “don’t send explicit images” needs a caveat: “If you do, it’s not the end of the world. We can fix it.”

“Try and take some of that shame away,” implores Beck.

“The reality is lots of kids send d*** pics. They just do. They shouldn’t. It’s a silly thing to do. But they get caught up in the moment for whatever reason. People need to know it can be dealt with, that they’re not committing the crime. Someone else is committing a crime against them.

“Rowan was a victim of crime and he’s dead because of it.”

Beck and Anthony miss everything about their beautiful boy, whose bright future will never be realised.

The way he bounced in the front door.

His voice on the other end of the phone.

And above all else, his smile.

“It’s so hard to be without him.”

Watch 7NEWS Spotlight: Sextortion on 7plus.

If you or someone you know have been the victim of sextortion in Australia, visit: https://www.accce.gov.au/sextortionhelp

If you need help in a crisis, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. For further information about depression contact beyondblue on 1300224636 or talk to your GP, local health professional or someone you trust.