How Did They Run an Elaborate "Sextortion" Scam From Prison? Cellphones.
GREENVILLE, S.C.—Just before noon on Sept. 11, 2018, a former Army private named Jared Johns lay down on his bed, turned on his iPhone’s camera and said goodbye to his family.
Toward the end of the two-minute video, Johns’s eyes widened as he read a text message on his screen: “She is going to the police, and you are going to jail,” it read.
Johns, who had served in Afghanistan, took a deep breath, placed a 9 mm handgun under his chin, and pulled the trigger.
The 24-year-old veteran was one of hundreds of former and current service members who have been targeted in a “sextortion” plot. The scheme that led to his suicide involves scam artists posing as underage girls on dating sites who then attempttried to blackmail men who responded to their lures, prosecutors say.
But the most startling aspect of the plot in Johns’s case was that it was allegedly carried out by inmates at Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in South Carolina about 150 miles east of Greenville. And the inmates
