BY GLENDA SOLOGASTOA
ILOILO City – An online extortion or prostitution syndicate could be behind the proliferation of photos showing a girl from this city in various stages of undress.
The girl’s shocked family has refused to be interviewed. But one aunt who requested for anonymity insisted her niece was not a prostitute but a victim.
From what the girl had so far told her family, the aunt said there were 12 other Iloilo girls in the same predicament as her niece.
The girl, identified by an alias in the website, was lured into doing pictorials by an “enterprising” woman operating a porno site two months ago, said the aunt.
She and the others were assured their faces won’t appear in the photos, the aunt added.
Lately, the girl had refused to do something the woman ordered her, the aunt further said, and this could be the reason for the photos now spreading online.
The girl now fears for her life.
“She knows the woman but doesn’t want to name her out of fear. There are many of them (girl victims) in Iloilo,” a source who had talked to the aunt said.
One of the porn sites even labeled the photos “koleksyon ng brainwashed girls, Iloilo edition.”
The girl is a second year college dropout. Her nude pictures showcasing different scenes were labeled from “part 1” to “part 4”.
The part 4 of the pictorial shows her wearing the uniform of Iloilo National High School in a number of porn sites.
The aunt described her niece, the youngest among three siblings, as “silent type”.
She said her niece heard a mouthful from family members upset of the photos.
The girl’s mother is a house help while the father used to work in a shipping line.
Embarrassed, the girl has refused to be seen in public.
The captain of the village where the girl resides, on the other hand, denied having known of porno-site prostitution in his territory.
Iloilo National High School principal, Dr. Nordy Siason has called on the National Bureau of Investigation to step in.
He fears that the use of the school uniform in the scandal could taint his school’s reputation.
Siason said he immediately ordered an investigation after he was informed about the photos. Records of past students were reviewed.
“That particular student, 100 percent, does not exist in our school right now,” Siason said.
But he did not discount the possibility that the girl was an alumna of Iloilo National High School.
Just last month, 58 people were arrested in the country for their involvement in a giant, global Internet “sextortion” network.
Victims have been lured by people posing as attractive, young women into giving sexually explicit photos or videos of themselves online, then blackmailed sometimes repeatedly for thousands of dollars, according to the Philippine National Police.
The Interpol’s Sanjay Virmani said those arrested in the Philippines were just a small part in an expanding global phenomenon that is being fuelled by the explosion of social media.
“The scale of this extortion network is massive,” said Virmani, director of Interpol’s Digital Crime Center.
The 58 arrested were subsequently charged with a range of crimes, including engaging in child pornography, extortion and using technologies to commit fraud./PN
