ROCK HILL — A newly elected state House representative is looking to change state law after his teen son took his life when online scammers convinced him to send nude photos and then tried to extort him for money.
Brandon Guffey, a Republican from Rock Hill, wants to make sexual extortion a crime with a punishment of up to 30 years in prison.
Guffey said he hopes a bill he filed before the January legislative session will encourage other states to adopt harsher penalties for what’s known as sextortion and will eventually push social media companies and dating apps to take a closer look at how they can prevent minors from being extorted.
“This is not a partisan issue,” he said. “Everyone should want to protect our children.”
Gavin Guffey, 17, died by suicide this summer after being sexually extorted online. His father, S.C. Rep. Brandon Guffey, R-Rock Hill, is now fighting for a bill that would push for harsh state penalties against people who sexually extort online. Brandon Guffey/Provided
Guffey’s 17-year-old son, Gavin, was talking to a woman over a social media app whom he thought was a volleyball player at a North Carolina university. She convinced him to send nude photos on July 26 and instantly threatened to release them publicly if he did not pay.
He sent her money over a mobile payment service that night, but the recipient said it wasn’t enough. The same night the threats came in, Brandon Guffey, a York County councilman who was the Republican nominee for the House seat at the time, said he left his gun out in the open. Gavin Guffey then take his own life.
Brandon Guffey said he found his son on the floor of the family’s bathroom covered in blood and lying on the ground.
“I couldn’t stop it,” Brandon Guffey said about the bleeding. “It was the scariest point in my life.”
In the days after his son’s death, mysterious messages popped up on the family’s phones. An account pretending to be Gavin Guffey’s girlfriend was demanding cash from Gavin Guffey’s brothers and cousins, saying she would expose photos of Gavin Guffey that would ruin Brandon Guffey’s political career.
“These people did their research, they knew I was in politics,” he said. “They tried to say they were hired by a political opponent.”
The case was passed along to the FBI and added to a pile of more than 7,000 other reports of financial sextortion of minors the agency received this year. The FBI said this was a “dramatic increase” in cases, but did not provide exact numbers.
More than a dozen teenage boys who have been victims of sexual extortion have died by suicide this year, the FBI said.
Brandon Guffey said he had been told multiple criminals were behind the volleyball player’s account and at least three arrests are expected. The FBI could not comment on the investigation.
Teenage boys often are targeted by social media accounts pretending to be women who want to pursue a romantic relationship with them, the FBI said in a Dec. 19 public safety alert.
In most cases people running sextortion accounts are from outside the country, “primarily in West African countries such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast,” the FBI said in a Dec. 19 release.
According to a 2017 online survey from the University of New Hampshire, 1 in 3 victims of sextortion said they had never told anyone what happened due to shame or embarrassment. More cases likely occurred this year that the federal government is not aware of, FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged in the Dec. 19 statement.
In November, Brandon Guffey released a 40-minute long video addressing his son’s suicide that detailed the moments leading up to his son’s death and how he learned his son was being extorted. Since then he said several York County parents reached out to him asking for help with how to deal with their sons’ sexual extortion.
He hopes that other parents of teenagers will understand the frequency that nude photos are exchanged online and have shame-free conversations with their children about scammers.
“Our country as a whole has forgotten grace and realize that we’re all going to make mistakes, but especially the younger kids and the vulnerable adults that are not thinking clearly are going to make those mistakes much easier,” Guffey said.
This bill is the first that Guffey filed since succeeding representative Bruce Bryant. If passed, South Carolina would be the only state to have a law on the books banning sextortion but no laws against revenge porn.
So far 26 states have made revenge porn and sextortion illegal, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Reach out to Maggie Brown on Twitter at @MaggieAbrown_ or 843-998-5647
