A Nigerian man has been extradited to the United States on charges that he targeted a 17-year-old South Carolina boy in a sextortion scheme that prosecutors contend led to the boy’s suicide, the U.S. Justice Department said on Monday.
In July 2022, the man, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal, posed as a college woman on social media and convinced the boy to send him sexually compromising images of himself, according to federal prosecutors.
Once Mr. Lawal secured the images, he threatened to release them unless the boy paid him, the authorities said.
Within two hours of receiving the threat, the boy, Gavin Guffey, shot himself at his home in Rock Hill, S.C., according to his father, Brandon Guffey, who is now a state lawmaker.
Mr. Lawal, 24, was taken into custody by F.B.I. agents in Lagos, Nigeria, on Friday after a two-year investigation aided by the Nigerian government, the Justice Department said. He was taken to South Carolina on Saturday.
Mr. Lawal is charged with child exploitation resulting in death; distribution of child pornography; coercion and enticement of a minor; cyberstalking resulting in death; and interstate threats with intent to extort, according to an October 2023 federal indictment that was unsealed Monday.
If convicted, Mr. Lawal could face a sentence of up to life in prison, according to the Justice Department. He has pleaded not guilty, according to court papers.
The public defender’s office assigned to represent Mr. Lawal did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday.
The Nigerian government agreed to extradite him to the United States on the condition that he would not face the death penalty, said Adair Ford Boroughs, the U.S. attorney for the District of South Carolina.
“I hope the message is clear,” Ms. Boroughs said at a news conference after Mr. Lawal was arraigned on Monday in U.S. District Court in Columbia, S.C. “If you use the internet to exploit children in our state, you will be held accountable here in courts. We will not allow predators to hide behind a keyboard or across an ocean.”
Mr. Lawal was being held at the Lexington County Detention Center ahead of a detention hearing next Monday, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Columbia.
Mr. Guffey, who said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Lawal had tried to extort money from him after his son’s death, was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in November 2022.
The first bill he sponsored, called Gavin’s Law, made sexual extortion a felony in South Carolina. It was signed in 2023 by Gov. Henry McMaster.
Sextortion schemes are a growing challenge and often ensnare American youth. Of the 13,000 reports of financial sextortion the F.B.I. received from October 2021 to March 2023, a vast majority of them involved boys.
There have been at least two other cases in which Nigerian men have been extradited to the United States on sextortion charges since 2023, according to the Justice Department.
Last year, two brothers from Nigeria were sentenced to 17 and a half years in prison for their roles in a sextortion scheme that claimed more than 100 victims, including a high school student in Michigan who killed himself in 2022.
From January 2021 through July 2023, at least 20 teenagers killed themselves after being caught in the schemes, according to the F.B.I.
Mr. Guffey, who attended Mr. Lawal’s arraignment in South Carolina on Monday, said he experienced both anger and relief in the courtroom.
“I don’t know if I’ve cracked every molar in my back jaw from gritting my teeth so bad,” he said. But he said he felt as if a significant step had been made toward achieving justice “considering the slim amount of people that have been extradited from Nigeria.”
