Judicial police in the northern Moroccan city of Tangier arrested on December 24 five suspects for alleged involvement in sextortion cases.
The Directorate General of National Surveillance (DGSN) said in a statement that the operation was carried out based on intelligence from the Directorate General of Territorial Surveillance (DGST).
DGSN further reported that the main suspect is a repeat offender who is involved in extortion cases. He is subject to a wanted notice at the national level for sextortion, added the statement.
DGSN reported that police apprehanded the other four sextorion accomplices in a rented apartment in Tangier.
During the operation, police confiscated electronic equipment and cell phones, apparently used to record the victims in compromising situations for blackmailing purposes..
The search operation also resulted in the seizure of pieces of cannabis resin, suspected to be intended for consumption.
Judicial police placed the suspects in custody for further investigation to shine more light on the case.
Commonly defined as the practice of extorting money or sexual favours from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity, sextorsion has been rampant in Morocco of late.
Morocco’s Hassan I University in Settat was rocked by recent scandales of sextortion, in what is known as “sex for marks.” Several professors in the Faculty of Law and Economics Faculty at the university are facing a list of charges including sextortion.
A female student filed a case against a professor and provided a videotape as evidence of the sexual harassement she had endured at the hands of the professor.
In a similar scandal in 2019, the Court of First Instance of El Jadida indicted a 24-year-old Moroccan of fraud, scams, and sexual blackmail via social media, for successfully entrapping more than 500 victims, mostly foreigners.
A French diplomat was subject to sextortion in the same year after a 27-year-old man blackmailed the diplomat after long discussions of sexual nature on social media. The diplomat filed a case but withdrew it fearing a scandal.
