On February 26, a 14-year old boy in Oakland County, Michigan broke down into hysterics. He told his brother that he had spent the week making sexually explicit videos with his computer's webcam, and that he had done so to appease a blackmailer he had met online. If he wasn't able to convince a friend to have oral sex with him on camera the next day, he risked exposure by the blackmailer. He had actually invited a friend over, without telling the friend why.

The brother told their parents, who immediately went to the Oakland County Sheriff's Office. A deputy arrived soon after and sat down with the 14-year old for an interview; what he heard was unbelievably lurid.

Two days before, on February 24, the boy had visited an unnamed video chat website. He made contact with a man there and showed the man his penis. The man was recording the chat and played back the recording for the boy. Not only did the recording show the boy's genitalia, but it included his face. The man promised to distribute the video to gay porn websites unless the 14-year old agreed to contact him at horni_man@hotmail.com and through Skype. The boy made the Skype call immediately, and the man on the other end announced the boy would now become his "cam slave" if he wanted to save his reputation.

The next day, a Saturday, the boy connected to the same Skype account as instructed. The man blacked out his own screen, but he could see the boy. "it's simple if u do what ur told the vid will NEVER b seen by anyone but me if not it will be," wrote the man. He listed specific websites to which he might post the video and told the boy, "ill add your name and email so if anyone googles u they will see ur video. So u wanna play or b a famous gay porn star?"

The boy felt he had no choice. When the man ordered him to dance around the room and remove his clothes, he did so. When the man ordered him to masturbate, he did so. When the man ordered him to lick his own ejaculate, he did so. The man then told him to show up the next day for another session.

The boy spent Sunday at a school sporting event. When he returned home, he connected to the man on Skype again. This session was even more depraved than the last. The man was recording it all, of course, and when it was over, the man showed him the new video. To keep all the videos off the Internet, the boy would have to return for one last session, this time with a friend. If the two would not have oral sex, the videos would be posted.

Whatever degradations the boy had experienced, at least they had involved him alone. Now he would have to rope someone new into the scheme, which was unlikely to be easy and would require some unbelievably awkward explanations. But the alternative was also horrific. The stress had become so extreme that the boy broke down on Sunday night and told his brother, who told the parents, who told police.

The Oakland County Sheriff looked at the e-mail headers from messages sent by horni_man@hotmail.com, each of which pointed to the same sender's IP address. The address was controlled by New Wave Communications, which in response to a subpoena told police that the address had been assigned to Clay County Internet, a small Internet provider and host serving the rural area southeast of Terre Haute, Indiana. (A price list from the company advertises dial-up Internet for $20/month and Web design for $55/hour.) Clay County Internet was run by one Richard Leon Finkbiner, but did Finkbiner have anything to do with the blackmail? Given that he ran a small ISP, it wasn't clear.

Oakland County sent a subpoena to Microsoft and brought in the FBI for help. An FBI agent in Detroit reviewed the messages in the horni_man account and found that whoever ran it had been extorting many other people, too. One victim had written, "all I ask you for is to delete it please im onlyh 14 please just do this to somebody else not me please." In a response to a separate victim, the account holder had warned that "I wont get caught im a hacker I covered my tracks."

But he hadn't. The FBI agent found a Google Voice number among the e-mail messages; a subpoena to Google revealed that the number had been registered to "Rick Finkbiner," who was about to receive a visit.

The warrant

On April 6, a federal search warrant team showed up at Finkbiner's home, which sat across from a cornfield on a rural state road. The team went through all computers and digital media in the home; they found thousands of videos showing hundreds of people going through the same ordeal as the 14 year old boy. As an FBI agent put it in a document filed later that day, "Many, if not most, of these individuals appear to be between the ages of 14-16 years of age."

Finkbiner agreed to an interview with the agents searching his home. Special Agent Ryan Barrett sat him down and asked him about the suspected blackmail. Finkbiner confessed. By his own admission, he had blackmailed around 100 people in the same way. When asked about pictures of a specific 14-year old boy, Finkbiner "could not specifically recall or recognize the images, stating that he had induced or coerced the production of videos and images of so many people engaged in sexually explicit conduct that he could not readily recognize every individual," Barrett wrote.

That same day, a federal magistrate judge signed off on an arrest warrant and Finkbiner was taken into custody.

“As a member of the law enforcement community, and more importantly, as a parent, these are the types of cases that keep me up at night,” said US Attorney Joseph Hogsett in a statement yesterday. “This defendant may not remember his alleged victims, but the true tragedy is that not one of them will ever forget.”

Only two of the victims have been identified so far, both 14-year old boys, but the FBI's Indianapolis "cybersquad" is asking victims to come forward. Based only on the initial charges against him, Finkbiner faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in jail if found guilty.

The case may prove to be the largest "sextortion" case on record; it certainly dwarfs other notorious cases, such as the one against wheelchair-bound California man Luis Mijangos, who remotely switched on webcams and microphones to monitor women at home. It's also a sobering reminder about the power of the Internet. The kind of crazy sexual extortion that would have taken some serious effort for a 14-year old from Oakland County to stumble into offline can now happen in the privacy of one's bedroom. All it takes is a laptop and a lack of good judgment.