When a Sextortion Victim Hacks Back

A college student frustrated with the handling of her case took matters into her own hands

- Joshua Brustein

Natalie Claus was getting accustomed to her sorority and preparing for winter break one evening in December 2019 when people she knew began receiving unusual messages from her. These Snapchat messages, which contained nude photographs of Claus, went to her friends, a cousin, an ex-boyfriend, and dozens of others she knew, more than 100 people in all. Some of the recipients responded with enthusiasm, others with confusion, as if Claus had played a bad joke. But one of her friends, Katie Yates, immediately recognized the messages as an online attack — and knew just how Claus should respond.

Yates was also a student at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, 40 miles south of Rochester, where Claus was a sophomore. Several months earlier, after Yates reported being sexually assaulted, someone had begun sending her abusive messages on social media. Feeling like she wasn’t getting enough support on campus, Yates began researching ways to identify her harasser.

This kind of vigilante work, she thought, could be useful to Claus. When Claus reached out asking for help, the two friends got together, tried to calm down, and got to work. “It was like a scene from a movie,” Claus later said, according to court documents. “You know they say everything around you slows? My ears were ringing, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and honestly I don’t think I was.” Yates walked Claus home and removed scissors and razor blades from her dorm room so Claus couldn’t hurt herself. “She wanted to see if I wanted to catch this guy,” Claus recalls. “Of course I said, ‘Yeah.’ ”