Loose Women star Nadia Sawalha has opened up about receiving a horrendous sextortion email that left her panicked – an experience that co-star Coleen Nolan also faced
Loose Women stars Nadia Sawalha and Coleen Nolan has opened up about the “anxiety” they felt when they received sextortion emails that claimed to have access to intimate videos of them.
Speaking on Loose Women today, Nadia shared how she had received an email with the opening line, “hello pervert”, which then attempted to blackmail her over alleged videos.
“It said, ‘We have all the videos of you having a happy time – giving yourself some alone time.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t think I have any videos of that.’ But then I went to fear again because then with deep fake, could there be?” she said.
Nadia Sawalha had also been through a sextortion attempt
“I felt anxious. I’m a 60-year-old woman who’s listened to countless podcasts about this, I know the information, I’ve read stuff about it, I’ve read terrifying stories about children killing themselves.”
She added: “Because I had all that information, by the time I got to the end of the email, I simply deleted the email because I knew that this was simply a phishing expedition.”
Coleen Nolan added that she had also received the same email and feared that someone had hacked into her phone. “Reading down, it said, ‘We’ve got all your videos and what you’ve done.’ I was just like, ‘Please can you send them to me, I’d be interested in seeing them as I’ve never made one in my life.’
“But it was horrendous,” she added, while Nadia said: “You do feel panicked, don’t you?” Coleen continued: “I knew I hadn’t done the videos but had they hacked into my phone? Were they going to lie on that? They said they were going to send it to my family and my work and kids. It did click in and then I deleted it.”
The panel discussed the rise in sextortion after the release of Channel 4’s documentary Hunting My Sextortion Scammer. The one-off film sees Rizzle Kick’s star Jordan Stephens fly over 4,000 miles to confront a Nigerian sextortion scammer.
In the documentary, Jordan looks into how teenage boys are being impacted by social media sextortion – where scammers trick young men into sending nude pictures of themselves before financially blackmailing them.
“Obviously I knew about scamming before but I was learning [about sextortion] in real time,” Jordan said of the investigation. “To learn that boys are taking their own lives was heartbreaking and devastating.
“It’s boys not understanding the consequences or risks of engaging online but with that panic, they can go from a normal life to not a life within half an hour and that is really scary.”
