Anderson Ofosuhene Ennin
A 39-year-old blogger and Director of Empressleak, a pornographic website which publishes nude pictures and videos of people especially ladies, has been grabbed.
The Cyber Crime Unit of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service is holding Anderson Ofosuhene Ennin, aka Mario Gee, for sextortion, a new word which refers to blackmailing victims so they would part with monies to avoid being featured on websites.
Empressleak has been in existence for a long time and has been publishing mostly leaked nudity of individuals on the Internet.
Suspect Mario Gee was said to have extorted various sums of money ranging from GH¢500 to GH¢2,000 from his victims before pulling their pictures down from the Empressleak website.
Some of his victims, according to the police, are school children below the ages of 16.
The arrest of Mario Gee came in the wake of the apprehension of several other victims, and already two of those behind such acts have been sentenced by a court this year for sextortion.
The modus operandi of Mario Gee, according to the police, is to recruit individuals who scout for images and videos of innocent individuals for him to publish on his site.
After the publication, parents of the victims who would want the pictures pulled down from the site are made to pay various sums of money before it is done.
Other victims who may have had the chance to see the pictures before it is pulled down also demand money from such victims before deleting them.
The police said the suspect, together with his cohorts, later share the booty among them and added that they had been engaging in the blackmail practice for about five years now.
Major Operation
At a press briefing yesterday, Director-General in charge of CID, COP Ken Yeboah, said in January 2020 that the Cyber Crime Unit, in collaboration with the National Cyber Security Centre, mounted an operation to arrest owners of the site.
After six months of intense, investigation and intelligence gathering, the team finally arrested Mario Gee at his residence at Osino in the Eastern Region, where he was uploading nude pictures and videos onto the website.
“All the digital devices used in the commission of the crime were retrieved and it will be subjected to forensic examination to retrieve evidence to assist investigation,” he said.
The Director-General of CID maintained that the police were pursuing other accomplices to assist in investigations.
Ursula Angle
The Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, who was at the news conference, said an investigation to clamp down on the activities of Empressleak was launched after a female senior high school student filed a report on January 6, 2020 with the computer emergency response team.
She said out of a total of 296 cases received between January and June 30, 2020, 79 of the cases were related to either sextortion, non-consensual sharing of intimate images or child online abuse.
She said that her ministry was working hard with its United States counterparts to ensure that the website, created in the United States of America, is shut down.
The website records about 600,000 users monthly patrons who are located in Ghana, Nigeria and the United Kingdom.
By Linda Tenya-Ayettey