Hamza Mon Amour

Marrakesh · 2016–2025 · Recent

This episode discusses sexual blackmail, non-consensual intimate images, and online harassment.

On 16 April 2016 an anonymous account appeared on Snapchat calling itself Hamza mon bb. Over the next three years it collected something like a million and a half followers, and it collected them by destroying people.

The method was simple and industrial. Phones and iCloud accounts belonging to Moroccan singers, presenters, influencers and businesswomen were broken into, and their private photographs, videos and messages were offered back to them for money. Pay, or it goes up. Around fifty people were targeted; by December 2019 the police had roughly seventy complaints. One television presenter was fired after the account published photographs of her, days before her wedding, which was then called off.

What followed was a Marrakesh courtroom rather than a manhunt: a YouTuber, a car-rental owner, a journalist and one of the country’s best-known singers, convicted in February 2020 and again on appeal in January 2021. The last of them walked out of Oudaya prison in January 2025. In August 2024 the name came back on Snapchat, threatening a new set of influencers — with no established connection to anyone who had been to court.