"He was pretty normal and quite likeable. "Beforehand, you have this stereotypical idea of the people that do it, that it's people sat in their basement, but actually he was a young guy," says Jess. Shockingly, he's a highly personable young rapper. In her documentary, Jess meets a former stolen nudes trader, Aku, who claims to have made around £500 a week from being an eWhorer. "The worst thing about it? Literally anyone could be doing it" "Everytime I meet someone, the first thing I think of is whether or not they've seen my images," she shares, explaining that eWhoring perpetrators don't necessarily look the way you might expect them to either. Hearing about this newer method of image based abuse, Jess says, has had a serious impact on her mental health and ability to trust when it comes to meeting new people. They're being traded like a card game, either for new packs, or money." It's believed eWhoring traders can make hundreds of pounds a week, depending on how many packs they have to hustle with and how many people they target. "And it's not just me it's happening to either, it's happening thousands of women every single day, all around the world. "It's almost like a hybrid of revenge porn mixed with catfishing," Jess says. "It's a sub-culture where women's photographs, predominately nudes, are either stolen or leaked online, then packaged up and traded or sold on forums." She adds that the intent is to either sell the images to make money, or to impersonate the women in the images. "eWhoring is an online fraud scam which, like catfishing, is hard to police," Jess explains to Cosmopolitan. While filming her brilliant new BBC documentary, When Nudes Are Stolen, a private investigator unearthed that Jess is also a victim of eWhoring. Yet, having now spent years discovering and reporting countless Tinder/Instagram/you name it profiles baring her face and body (created by scammers to try and extract everything from money to attention from unsuspecting victims), Jess learnt that the way in which her images were being abused had shockingly evolved. It's largely those pictures from Jess's old website that are still being abused today, over a decade later, along with any newer photos that she posts on her social media accounts (including shots of her with friends and family). In those earlier days of the internet (in a time before Instagram and dating apps had really taken off), little thought was given to where those images could end up, or the way they may be used, later down the line. While working as a model during the Zoo and FHM glory days, Jess was encouraged by her manager to set up her own website and share more personal looking images on it – think: bedroom underwear shots and smiley selfies, rather than polished studio set-ups. Jess Davies had known for a while that photographs she'd taken during her former glamour modelling days were being used to catfish people.
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