On Monday, the competent Iraqi authorities announced the arrest of a man who threatened his ex-wife to publish an intimate photograph of her if she refused to pay him money.
The Interior Ministry-Baghdad Crime Control Department said in a statement that the police managed to “arrest a suspect for electronically blackmailing his ex-wife and threatening to publish her private photos on social media unless she pays a sum of money.” in Baghdad,” Alsumaria News reports. The statement stated that the actions of the competent authorities were taken after “the applicant sought assistance from our units regarding the fact that her ex-wife had been subjected to electronic blackmail”. He continued: “An investigative working group was immediately formed, and after investigating and collecting information, in agreement with the complainant, a tight ambush was set up and the accused was arrested at the scene of the crime.”
The statement stated that “during the investigation, the accused frankly admitted that he sent photographs of his ex-wife and blackmailed her.”
Iraq has recently been suffering from an exacerbation of the phenomenon of electronic extortion. The Public Police Directorate under the Home Office uncovered 1,950 cases of extortion last year, most of the victims were women, including teenage girls and children under the age of fourteen. According to the latest statistics released by the global hub We Or Social, the number of social media users in Iraq exceeded 28 million in 2021, up 3.35 million from the previous year.
