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The Seeking honey trap case

The Seeking Honey Trap: How the High Court Named a Sextortion Gang and Kept Its Victims Anonymous

/ Key cases by Yair Cohen, Online harassment / By / Leave a Comment

The call came at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon in July, which is the hour at which most of London’s lawyers are thinking about the weekend. The man on the line was in New York and had not slept properly in weeks. He had until Monday. On Monday, unless he paid, the messages he had exchanged with a woman he met on a dating site would be sent to his wife, to his family and to the people he did business with, and something worse would go with them: a made-up allegation involving children, the kind that ends a marriage and a career in the same afternoon whether or not a word of it is true. He had already paid $50,000. He had hired investigators in the United States. Neither the money nor the investigators had made it stop. Each payment had bought him a few days of quiet and a larger demand. Now the deadline was Monday, and he was ringing a solicitor in London, because the people threatening him appeared to be British.

I asked him the question I always ask first, and his answer is the reason this article exists.

Clothed photographs only

He had sent no explicit material at all. Clothed photographs only. He told me this the way people confess something, and it took a moment to make him understand that it was not a confession but the most important fact in his favour. The scheme does not need your nudity. It needs your fear. Once a gang like this has decided you are worth blackmailing, they invent whatever they are missing, and in this case the invention was an accusation of child exploitation, which is the blackmailer’s favourite because it is the one allegation nobody can afford to be seen defending. Mr Justice Fordham’s judgment records the demand: £39,000 at first, then £100,000.

The blackmail on the dating website Seeking

The site was Seeking, a dating platform on which well-off men meet younger partners. The profile was a young woman. The conversation had followed a script that I could have recited to him before he reached the end of it: warm, then intimate, then, quite suddenly, commercial, the moment the tone changes and the person you thought you were talking to turns out never to have existed. The demands arrived by Telegram and WhatsApp from American telephone numbers; the money was to go into Revolut and Wise accounts. Every channel the gang used is listed, with the defendants, in the order Mrs Justice Farbey made on 18 July 2026, because in this kind of case the channels are the defendants until the people behind them have names.

We had met them before

I recognised the shape of it before he had finished. Three weeks earlier a British businessman had come to us with a story that was the same story. He had been talking to what he believed was a woman, and had exchanged images with her. The people on the other end ran his photographs through facial recognition, found out who he was, and threatened to send everything to his wife and his business contacts. Between February and June 2026 he paid them more than $70,000 and a further £30,000. Each payment bought a short silence and a bigger demand. He came to us on 24 June, and we did something that looks odd from the outside: we spent five days preparing an application, and then we waited. A blackmailer always sends another demand. On 29 June it came, for £50,000, and on the evening of 30 June Mrs Justice Ellenbogen granted an injunction without notice to the other side, naming Daniel Ryan, Kane Samms and Liam Gill, together with persons unknown, and ordering them within 24 hours to say who was behind the Telegram and WhatsApp accounts and who had received the money. She continued the order on 3 July. The claimant is known in the proceedings as RXE, and that is all he will ever be called.

So when the New York call came on a Friday afternoon, my in-house investigators, the same team that found Sasha Davies’s catfish in 48 hours, did not start from nothing. Aytan and his colleagues had the handles, the numbers, the payment channels and the habits of a gang they had already traced. Within hours they had linked the new demand to the same people. There is a particular silence in an office when that happens: the moment a frightening stranger becomes a known quantity with a file. We drafted through the Friday night. On Saturday 18 July, with the disclosure due on the Monday, Mrs Justice Farbey sat and granted an emergency injunction, again without notice, naming Daniel Ryan, Kane Robert Samms and Dylan Nelson and persons unknown, with the claimant anonymised as HSX. She fixed a return date of 28 July and imposed a temporary restriction on reporting until then. The order was served the way these orders are served, through the same Telegram and WhatsApp accounts that had been carrying the threats. The accounts that had been used to demand £100,000 became the addresses for service of a High Court order.

The judgment, and the names

On 29 July Mr Justice Fordham continued the injunction until trial, kept the claimant anonymous because that was strictly necessary, and discharged the reporting restriction. He gave a public judgment, HSX v Daniel Ryan and others [2026] EWHC 1985 (KB). None of the defendants appeared or was represented; the men who had set a Monday deadline for someone else did not keep the court’s own. The judgment says what every blackmail victim needs to hear before they pay another penny: “a blackmailer cannot claim any significant Article 10 rights to freedom of expression”. The right to free speech in Article 10 does not stretch to “pay me or I tell your wife”, and a court will not pretend that it does.

The orders were published on the judiciary’s website, as the rules require. The victims’ names are not on them. The defendants’ names are. That reversal, the frightened man kept private and the people who frightened him put on the public record, is the whole point of the exercise, and it is the outcome the blackmailer never plans for. He plans for a payment or a silence. He does not plan for his own name on a court list.

The influencer

On 16 August the Daily Mail reported that one of the men named in both orders, Kane Samms, 35, is a social media influencer, and that his girlfriend, a TikTok personality, had ended the relationship after the story appeared. Mr Samms denies any involvement. I should say plainly what the court has and has not decided. Both orders are interim. They were made without notice, on the claimants’ evidence, and continued until trial with no defendant present. They are not findings of fact against anyone, and the trial, if there is one, is where the allegations against each named man would be tested. What has been decided is that the claimants are likely to establish at trial that the material should not be published, which is the legal test for an injunction of this kind, and that in the meantime the threats have to stop.

What these two cases teach

You do not need to have sent anything explicit. HSX sent clothed photographs. The gang invented the rest. The question is never “what did I send?” but “what would I pay to keep a lie out of my wife’s inbox?”, and they already know the answer.

Paying does not end it. Paying marks you. One client paid more than $100,000 in all before he called anyone. Each payment told the gang two things: that he could pay, and that he was frightened enough to. The demands rose with every transfer, as they always do.

You do not need to know who they are to stop them. Both claims were issued against persons unknown, identified by the accounts they used, and the orders were served through those same accounts. Blackmail is a crime, and in the civil courts it is treated as misuse of private information and harassment, both of which the court will restrain by injunction whether or not the defendant has a name yet.

The court is faster than the blackmailer. A Saturday judge for a Monday deadline. Forty-eight hours from first instruction to a served order in the earlier case. The High Court’s out-of-hours arrangements exist for exactly this, and a well-prepared application, filed the moment the next demand arrives, is the difference between an order that arrives in time and one that arrives after the disclosure. The waiting, which feels unbearable to the client, is the part that wins.

The victim stays anonymous. The blackmailer does not. Anonymity for the claimant under section 11 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 is granted where it is strictly necessary, and in a blackmail case it almost always is, because publishing the victim’s name would do the blackmailer’s work for him. The defendants get no such protection.

A word to the men who have not rung anyone yet

Every man who has come to me with one of these cases has been ashamed, and every one of them has apologised for wasting my time before telling me what happened. None of them wasted it. The shame in these cases belongs entirely on the other side of the Telegram account. If you are reading this with a deadline running, three things. Do not pay. Do not delete anything. Ring someone who has done this before, today, because the people threatening you are counting on you doing none of those things, and a weekend, as it turns out, is long enough.

The claimants in both cases are anonymised by order of the High Court and are referred to here only as RXE and HSX. Both orders are interim and the allegations against the named defendants have not been tried. Mr Samms denies any involvement.

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