GODFREY GEORGE in this first part of a two-part report examines the ordeals of Nigerian teenagers whose sex tapes are uploaded to porn sites by sly lovers
Sixteen-year-old female admission seeker identified only as Folu had no hint that a boy who once confessed love to her was responsible for leaking videos of their intimate moments on the Internet.
A fun-seeking teenager, who sat for the West African Senior School Certificate Examinations in September last year, would have to live with the trauma of her nakedness on pornographic websites and blogs globally.
Folu wore a flowing black gown and a shimmery peach-coloured shawl wrapped around part of her face and neck when our correspondent visited her.
Still visibly shaken from the trauma, the distraught teenager sat on a bench by a waterfront, overlooking a compound in Lagos housing a tree with scanty leaves.
She was with an older woman whom our correspondent later got to know as her cousin. The older lady, who gave her name as Linda, wore a pair of bogus glasses and a bucket cap. From their mannerisms, it was obvious that the duo don’t live in the area.
Folu’s eye bags looked like they carried the weight of her shame and guilt of the past which had come to haunt her. She stared at the water body ahead and became quiet for minutes before sobbing.
“I didn’t know he was recording me. I wouldn’t have let him record me. My future is finished!” she sobbed louder, with Linda consoling her with pats on her back.
Folu said she and a neighbour, whose name she gave only as Atanda, 24, started dating in December 2019, a month before her 15th birthday. The duo, who met on social media, started out a friendship that, according to Folu, was not defined but ‘had a lot of benefits.’
“He buys me airtime and sends me data. Anytime we meet, he buys me things,” she said.
Asked about how she got entangled in the web of pornography, she said, “Atanda told me he liked me during one of the evenings we met. Before I knew what was happening, we were kissing and it ended in lovemaking. It was not my first time though. I had had sex in the hostel during one of our inter-house sports the same year so it was not much of a big deal. I liked the guy, and he didn’t give me any reason to doubt his love.”
Folu said she later found out during one of the evenings she spent with Atanda that he lied about his age.
“I saw a birth certificate among his things when I was arranging the room one evening; it showed he was 24 (years old). He had told me he would be 20 in a month’s time, which was part of the reason I dated him. But, I had already liked him and there was not so much difference, so we continued the relationship after he explained that his reason for lying about his age to me was because he didn’t want to lose me. To be honest with you, I told him I was 16 (years old), not 15,” she added.
Folu told Saturday PUNCH that the love-making became a regular occurrence as she sneaked out of her parents’ home, when they were away to visit Atanda in his apartment; a few kilometers from hers.
She added, “He would cook me noodles; we would bathe together, after that, we would make love. It was a routine.
“One day I got a message from one of my friends to check out a link online; what I saw when I opened the link made my heartbeat stop for a while. It was as if I was dreaming.’’
She picked a stick lying carelessly nearby to scribble some illegible words on the ground. Tears had begun to flow in rhythmic silence down her cheeks but wiped with the shawl wound round her neck.
“I saw a video collage of myself and Atanda having sex. All the times we had sex at his house, he recorded it with a secret cam and made a collage with it which he posted online. In all the videos, none had his face in it. It was mine in full glare.
“Each of the videos had an odious title: One read thus: ‘See what dirty Nigerian teen was caught doing with her lover inside bush’ even though it (sex) didn’t happen in the bush. One of the commenters called me a ‘slut’; the other said I was a ‘cheap Nigerian b*tch.’ I have never been so humiliated,” she said.
She told our correspondent that she decided to confront Atanda with her discovery only for him to say, “Oh! So you saw it?” and hung up the phone.
“That was the last time I heard from him. His phone line stopped going through and his house was locked the many times I went there. I later learnt that the house was up for sale. I almost died. I came down with a terrible fever. My limbs were sore.” she added.
She said she lost so much weight as she stopped eating, and it made her parents worried.
“As the views in that video grew, it shrunk a part of me. At one point, I found it difficult to breathe well. I became numb for weeks; and since I could not talk to anybody about what was going on, it was eating me up slowly,” Folu added.
Folu said she confided in Linda who found out that Atanda was only a house agent contracted by former occupants of the house to evacuate the things there, sell them and make returns.
Folu said, “All the talk of him moving into the neighbourhood was false. He only used me. I even found out he was 32 years old and not 24 as I saw on his birth certificate which I think was forged. How am I even sure his real name is Atanda? My sex videos with him are now online and maybe there for a long time. I don’t know how many people have seen it.”
Linda said she sought to get Atanda arrested but, at the time, Folu refused to cooperate with her, and warned her not to involve her parents.
“In the videos online, his face was not visible, and since Folu was hiding the relationship, she had no pictures of him on her phone. His social media pages were not coming up. Maybe, he deactivated them or something. We wanted to report the matter to the police, but it will look awkward,”she said.
Checks by our correspondent showed that Atanda’s social media accounts have been sold to online fraudsters.
Folu noted that the incident affected her mental health so badly that she had become a ‘shadow’ of herself.
She added, “I hide behind a veil whenever I come out so I don’t get recognised by anyone who may have seen the video. I deactivated all my social media accounts and barely used my phone. I can’t even stand my parents face-to-face. When they call my name, my heart skips. It is traumatising, I must say.
“Please, help me get that video down. I don’t want my parents to see it. If they do, I am finished; not only will they disown me, my future will be truncated. Please, help me!”
When our correspondent traced the link to the video online, it was hoisted on one of the x-rated pornographic sites and had over 17,000 views as of 10.06 pm, April 23, 2022.
A message was sent to the official mails of the x-rated sites for the videos to be taken down. At the time of filing this report, three of the sites have sent back inquiries that they were working on “verifying our claims” and would “do the needful.”
Endangered species
Like Folu, many Nigerian teenagers have become endangered species. They are hunted by online paedophiles whose intentions, among many others, are to use them as sources of sexual pleasure to fulfill their desires and/or as strings of financial enrichment.
Amid the international interventions on protecting the child and forging a better world where young people can thrive, there are still rising statistics of sexually-explicit content of Nigerian minors scattered all over the internet.
A visit to any of these x-rated sites would reveal titles such as, “Nigerian teen goes solo and c*ms multiple times,” “Sexy Nigerian teen moans loud and c*ms”, “Teenage girl sucks the d*ck of her teacher,” among others.
If these contents are on the internet, this indicates that some persons are in the game, acting either as donors or as recipients.
On one of the x-rated sites monitored by our correspondent, the views for a video of a Nigerian minor pleasuring himself, posted on November 8, 2021, had garnered over 27 million views as of April 24, 2022 (five months later).
Comments from Nigerians craving to have the similar experience with the minor were observed. Some of the commenters asked the content host to provide them with some contact information on how to reach the teen amateur porn actor.
In December 2014 and 2015, the proportion of searches for pornography on Google in relation to other searches was higher in Nigeria than in the United States, according to Real Africa; an adult online platform.
One of the world’s top pornography sites, in 2015, puts the monthly average for the number of searches for pornographic content in Nigeria at 135,000 in one month. Also, in September 2021, the porn site listed Nigerians as the highest consumers of their content, with over 1.3 million searches recorded in a day.
But it was perhaps unknown that most of the content consumed online by these Nigerians belongs to Nigerian teenagers who were either lured into the act by paedophiles or used as bait to build a sinister empire of teen porn actors across the country.
The diverse victims
Investigations carried out by Saturday PUNCH showed that there are three sets of teenagers involved in this illegal game.
On the one hand, there is the set of teenagers, like Folu, who have no idea that their sexually-explicit contents are online and are being monetised by some hosts on x-rated websites. There are those who knew they were being filmed but did not know it would be hoisted on these sites and monetised. Also, there are teenagers who go into the trade of their own volition for financial reasons.
When our correspondent got a few clips of one 16-year-old, whose videos showed her making out with a young man with grey-coloured hair and a tattooed body, it was distressing for her to find out that her contents were on the platforms and being monetised without her knowledge.
Our correspondent contacted a team of cyber experts for a fee who used a face recognition model app to trace the face on the videos to an Instagram account.
Asking the user, who gave her name only as Clementina, whether or not she was aware that her sexual contents were online, she said, “It is not possible na. My porn video? Online? How? Am I a porn star? I cannot do that nonsense, please!”
When the links to the videos were sent to her on request, she became quiet for a few days before she reached out through a mobile number that our correspondent left in her inbox.
“I had no idea these videos were online. It is shocking to me that my face is visible in these videos,” Clementina said.
On enquiring about who the male actor was, she said, “He was my boyfriend. His name is Ola. I say ‘was’ because I have just broken up with him with this revelation. He is 25 years old, and he lives close by.
“I clocked 17 years in March. He used to come to my house when my mom had gone to work and I didn’t go to school, and he’d say we should ‘play’ and that he would record us. We would have sex and watch it later and just laugh.
“He said he would use the videos to remember me whenever he travels or when we cannot meet because of school. One time, I walked in on him watching one of those videos; he was masturbating with it. He promised to delete them afterwards. That is why I am surprised how they found their way online.”
Attempts to get the contact of the boyfriend was futile as Clementina stopped responding and blocked our correspondent from reaching her via her phone lines and social media handles, leaving a message: “I don’t want anything that will put me in trouble. I am still under my parents. If my parents find out, they’d kill me. Please, don’t disclose my identity to anyone. Just help me delete those videos. Leave Ola; I will handle him. I don’t want any problems. I am too young to destroy my future, please, sir,” she wrote.
As of the time of filing this report, Clementina’s Instagram page has been deactivated.
However, further investigations by our correspondent showed that the said Ola may not be the only one who had recordings of sexual intercourse with Clementina.
Some porn videos posted in 2018 had a few different boys who did not fit Ola’s description.
The boys in the porn videos were also careful not to show their faces. Thus, it would be a difficult task unmasking their identities. It was obvious that Clementina kept some information to herself.
Similarly, another 17-year-old girl who gave her name only as Tamara would have to learn to lead her life with the constant reminder that a sex video she made when she was 16 years old was out on the internet.
She told our correspondent that she used to send her nude pictures and some short videos to her boyfriend in her age grade. She added that she was unaware that he would share them on a WhatsApp group with other boys.
The Rivers State-based teen said, “I was still in secondary school then. We were preparing for WASSCE when we started (dating). Before then, he would send me a picture of his manhood and would ask me to send a picture of my private parts to him too. I refused at first. But when he insisted, I sent a picture.
“It became a daily occurrence as I would snap my breasts, my butts and my private parts and send to him on his request and he would send a picture of his manhood, too. I became comfortable with it because it was fun then.”
Tamara said after a while, her lover began to request videos, where he would tell her to “do some things to herself” and send them to him and he would do the same.
“He told me to put my fingers into my private part and send him a video of it. At first, it was awkward, but I loved him then so I just played along. Nobody knew what was going on. I would go into the bathroom and do what he asked me to and return to my room. I shared them with my elder sisters,” she said.
She said another male friend who was in the WhatsApp group where her boyfriend shared those videos used them to mock her when they had an argument in class towards the end of the examinations. That was how she got to know that her boyfriend, whose name she gave as Tonye, was not the only one who had access to the videos.
“He told me he saw the videos that I sent to my boyfriend and that I was a slut for agreeing to do those ‘dirty’ things. I had an argument with my boyfriend about it and he threatened to send them out and he did. Much later, I got to see some of those videos on some blogs and some porn sites. I called my boyfriend then and asked him how he could do such a thing, but what he said didn’t make sense to me,” she added.
Tamara said till date, her nude videos were on the internet.
“My face was visible in one of the videos. I don’t know if I would say that I have been lucky my parents haven’t seen them. When my elder sister’s friend saw it and sent the link to me, asking me what was going on, I almost committed suicide. She was the one who went to see the boy and threatened him that she would involve the police. He then said he sent it to his friends and did not know which of them posted it on the site. There was little she could do because our family’s image was at stake and I didn’t want her to involve the police. To date, whenever I watch those videos, I just want to kill myself,” she said.
Our correspondent, through the help of some tech experts, was able to get the videos down from a few blogs and on one of the x-rated sites where they were hoisted after a series of complaints.
However, other sites still have the contents, garnering more views by the hour and fetching dollars for the hosts.
Further findings by Saturday PUNCH later revealed that one Todun was the first person to post the video on his profile on the porn site.
As of February 2022, the videos page by Todun had over 5,055 subscribers and 41 videos which had an average of one million viewers and 800 comments from mostly Nigerian users.
The profile name and setup showed that the account belonged to a 26-year-old Nigerian male.
When our correspondent contacted Todun, he blocked him and restricted access to his Instagram page.
One of those videos, posted by Todun, which had Tamara’s face, had over 22,000 views and over 2,000 comments as of 1.07 am, November 24, 2021.
‘I didn’t know I was being recorded’
For another teenager identified only as Queeneth, life took a really sad twist when a distant cousin sent a link to a nude video to her on WhatsApp.
“When she (cousin) asked if I was the one in the video, I quickly denied it. I swore with everything that I knew that it was not me, and somehow, she believed me.
“I don’t even know how she found that kind of video. I had to call the guy whom I had sex with and he told me that his phone was stolen and said some other incoherent things and expected me to believe him.
“I found out later on that he was a host on a porn site and would secretly film anyone he slept with and post it on the site to make money. I spoke to one of my confidants about it and she helped me get the video down after threatening legal actions. The porn site even apologised, stating that they didn’t know I was a minor. Only God knows how many innocent girls must have fallen prey to his schemes,” she said.
Our correspondent went on that porn site to check the profile Queeneth provided and found out that it had many videos of different teenagers – male and female – who were either making out independently or as a group.
It’s unclear who owns the videos and if consent was taken, but running screenshots taken from the videos through a face scanner showed that 87 per cent of the actors were teenagers between ages 15 and 17 as of November 2021.
A quick run on the social media handles confirmed the findings. Seven of the 15 social media accounts owners contacted by Saturday PUNCH said they were between 15 and 17 years old.
Quick money scheme
On February 1, 2021, it was reported that men of the Nigerian Police Force arrested seven suspects for multiple abductions and child pornography. They were accused of taking advantage of underage girls whom they sexually abused, recorded video of their acts and shared on an international social media WhatsApp group chat known as ‘Pervertidos.’
Most of the videos the men made of the underage girls as of the time of filing this report were still accessible online. Multiple sites, blogs and other media outlets took the videos and put them up on their platforms. As much as one clicks on the link either out of curiosity or for sexual aggrandisement, the sites rake in money, most times, in dollars.
With the advent of free-to-all access to the Internet, anybody can access almost anything with a click once on an internet-enabled phone.
In the sex tape involving pupils of a popular, Lagos-based secondary school, over 48 Nigerian blogs and social media platforms posted the porn video or links redirecting curious searcher to where to watch the video for cheap clicks.
The disgrace
The x-rated sites have an attractive reward system to users. Users get juicy offers for posting originally-recorded videos, to recording and sharing amateur contents of anyone online. There seems to be no compliant with their rule that only people aged between 18 and 21 should create, view or own ‘consensual adult pornographic contents.’
In fact, one of the accounts on one of the porn sites with the name ‘Anaedo’, has a profile that reads, “27 year-old-male” but the picture on display is that of a female. The contents also posted were from multiple sources – both male and female – as they displayed different teenagers performing sexual activities.
Another host on a popular porn site, identified as ‘Fizzyb Huncho,’ wrote that he is a 23-year-old man, but the video on the account showed that a teenager whose content he hoisted had generated over 24,000 views as of 01.42 am on April 2, 2022.
When Saturday PUNCH contacted the teenager to tell him of the video, he said, “I have seen it. I don’t know what to do. You are not the first person that has drawn my attention to it. I was young. That is one of the stupid things I regret doing. I need help if you can help me.”
For another user ‘Brenttord’, who had over 61,000 subscribers, the display picture when scanned showed that it belonged to a teenage American actor. However, investigations by our correspondent indicated that the contents on the page belonged to Nigerian teenagers who made videos of themselves masturbating.
Many of the victims told our correspondent that their innocence was exploited by people they trusted.
One of the victims who gave his name only as Samuel said his dad disowned him when the scandal of his porn video broke.
“My father couldn’t take it. He is a pastor. It rocked his ministry so much. People who saw it, posted it on the church WhatsApp group,” he said.
On the genesis of the video, Samuel, who claimed to be 21 years old, said, “I was around 16 or 17 years old when it happened. I like to make videos of myself masturbating. You know all this teenage stuff na (sic). All my guys do it, too. We would use it to tease ourselves. Some of us would film ourselves kissing a girl and we share it among ourselves.
“It was not just mine that got leaked. All of us got our videos out there though two of them were able to pull the videos off the Internet, but can they pull the memories out of the minds of those who had already viewed them?”
“I am just thankful for my mum. She stood by me then, and has been by me till now. I almost committed suicide then, but I am stronger now though.’’
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