The Fifteen Minutes No One Can Explain - Episode 93

The Video That Was Never Sent: The Sextortion Cases of Asia Anderson and Walker Montgomery

A sixteen-year-old boy spent three hours pleading with strangers online while his parents slept twenty feet away — and the video they threatened to release was never sent to a single person. Across nearly a decade, one man running what the FBI called the worst criminal operation in Facebook's history kept approximately 375 victims silent through a single, devastating bluff. How does a threat with no real power destroy so many lives?

In this episode, we explore how Buster Hernandez built a sextortion operation targeting girls as young as twelve using copy-paste scripts and fabricated proof, how Facebook took the unprecedented step of building a custom hacking tool to catch him, and why a sixteen-year-old in Mississippi named Walker Montgomery saw no way out of a three-hour nightmare that left no real evidence behind. These two cases share one unbearable truth: the most destructive weapon was never a file, a photo, or a video — it was the fear of one.

Case Details

Victim: Asia Anderson, 18 at time of first contact, restaurant host, Indianapolis, Indiana; Walker Montgomery, 16, high school student and football player, Starkville, Mississippi.

Date: September 2014 – March 2021 (Anderson/Hernandez case); November 30 – December 1, 2022 (Montgomery case).

Location: Indianapolis, Indiana and Bakersfield, California, USA; Starkville, Mississippi, USA.

Case Status: Buster J. Hernandez pleaded guilty to all 41 charges on February 6, 2020, and was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison in March 2021. The Nigerian criminal group responsible for Walker Montgomery's death has been identified by IP address but no arrests or extraditions have been confirmed.

Episode Key Points

- Hernandez never possessed the explicit photos he claimed to have when he first contacted Asia Anderson — he bluffed using a sticky note detail extracted from her public Facebook profile.

- A Virginia girl reported Hernandez to local police in October 2014, but the responding officer accused her of lying and threatened her with juvenile detention, effectively ending that investigation.

- Facebook, calling Hernandez the worst criminal to ever use their platform, paid a private cybersecurity firm to build a custom hacking tool targeting his specific operating system — a tool that had a window of only days before a routine update would have made it useless.

- The sextortionists who targeted Walker Montgomery never actually sent his video to any of his contacts; every screenshot they showed him of the video being distributed was fabricated.

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