More and more teenagers are threatened with sextortion

Sextortion is generally considered a problem that girls and women face. A teenage girl sends explicit photos to her boyfriend, they break up and he threatens to leak her photos if she doesn't get back with him or send more photos.

But a new report from nonprofits Thorn and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) shows that more and more abusers are demanding money in so-called financial sextortion and targeting boys rather than girls.

“Financial sextortion is different from the sextortion cases we've been tracking for 10 years,” says Melissa Stroebel, head of research at Thorn, which focuses on combating child sexual abuse.

From August 2022 to August 2023, NCMEC's ​​CyberTipline received an average of 812 sextortion reports per week, according to the report. More than two thirds concerned requests for money. The median amount requested was $390 and the median amount paid was $100.

Among victims of financial sextortion, 90% were boys aged 14 to 17, according to the report. One reason offenders target boys is because they are less likely to ask for help and tell people they are victims of extortion, Stroebel says.

The report also examines where “first contact” was made. This was often on social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. There were also lesser-known platforms like Omegle (which was shut down) and Wizz. Some victims were then invited to move to a secondary, more “private” platform to continue the conversation.

The impact of online sextortion

Another unique aspect of recent financial sextortion cases is that boys are not targeted by children they know. On the contrary, organized criminals, operating mainly in Nigeria and Ivory Coast, usually engage in catfishing during adolescence to obtain their nude photos. Once they have them, they threaten to leak the images, make them go viral, and ruin the boys' lives if they don't send money, usually in the form of gift cards or Cash App.

“This involves particularly aggressive threats about potentially life-altering consequences,” says Stroebel. The attackers claim that if the boys don't send money, their leaked nudes could lead to them being kicked out of school, fired from their jobs, or even jail time. They pressure victims to send money quickly so they don't have time to seek help or consider other options available to them, she says .

Beyond money, being a victim of financial sextortion comes with other costs, particularly in terms of mental health. In the 9% of cases analyzed by researchers that included consequences for victims, one in six children said they had considered suicide or self-harm. Victims “feel incredibly isolated and cut off from any hope of things getting better,” Stroebel says.

For the report, researchers from Thorn and NCMEC analyzed data on child sextortion cases from August 2021 to August 2023 and reported them to NCMEC's ​​CyberTipline. These were mostly mandated reports from social media platforms, but also included some reports from the public.

Due to limitations in this study's design, Stroebel says the report is unable to determine whether financial sextortion is replace Traditional types of sextortion cases from friends and exes targeting girls and young women.

Additionally, other studies of sextortion are typically based on victims' own reports, says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. This makes new findings difficult to compare to previous research, like comparing apples to oranges. But he acknowledges that financial sextortion is on the rise and that boys and young men are its main targets.

Importantly, 11% of targeted teens never sent explicit photos to people who demanded them, but instead the attacker threatened them with deepfake or edited images, such as with their head on someone's naked body. other. This threat will only increase as generative AI becomes more advanced and easier to use.

“It sometimes impacts children whether they share images or not, and we can't use this idea of ​​'well, my child would never share a nude,' as a guaranteed defense that they won't be not yet manipulated into paying someone,” Stroebel says.

That said, if a person doesn't share nude photos, their chances of being a victim are much lower, says Finkelhor.

How parents can help

Talking to teens about the potential consequences of sharing nude photos (and with younger children about general internet safety) can help them decide not to send explicit photos in the first place. But parents shouldn't focus so much on the consequences that children feel like they can't tell anyone if it happens.

“We need them to leave these conversations thinking that no matter what, they can come to us, we have this open door and things will get better,” Stroebel says. “We need to have open, frank, early conversations with them before we find ourselves in a moment of crisis. »

If a child is the victim of sextortion of any kind, Thorn's Take It Down tool can help remove sexually explicit images of minors from the Internet. Thorn also has resources on her website that can help parents have these difficult conversations with their children.