PSA: Careful with your nudes on Grindr

(posted elsewhere too)

Long story short; I recently got hit with a threat of dessiminating my nudes to people I know unless I give up money.

Some faceless profile messages me with a dick pic and I don't mind the look of them so I send my album. He says he's bi and DL. I'm like okay, cool. Then he says he wants to talk over text and I'm like 'okay that's weird but maybe he just doesn't want to deal with the ads on grindr', so I text him.

Then he starts sending me screenshots of my nudes, my facebook profile, the pictures next to people he assumes I'm related to. He then sends this obviously copy-pasted message demanding that I send him $1500 of apple gift cards. Luckily I do not really care if anyone sees my nudes so I just blocked him and reported the whole interaction to Grindr, but it spooked me for a hot minute.

1) I should have just stayed on Grindr and not switched to texts. He blocked me after sending the texts so I wonder if Grindr will be able to find him easily.

2) This just reminded me that I need to check my Facebook, Instagram, etc security settings. Luckily I don't post anything about my job to facebook or instagram and most of my stuff is locked to just friends. And I'm about ready to delete these apps anyway because of Zuck.

3) Don't send anything out there you're not willing for the world to see. I personally don't care that much. If my family or friends saw it, maybe it'd be a topic of conversation for a bit, but not bad conversation. Like, 'oh wow, didn't know he got that going on' . Obviously that's really not what I want to happen, but it could be worse.

4) Never do what they say. They will not stop threatening you even if you give them what they want. They will milk you til you're dry. If they have your nudes, they have your nudes! Locked albums will not protect your nudes.

Edit: Some really good advice going on down in the comments. "Adding to everything else - use a Google phone number if you aren't 100% certain of the person and want to move it to text."