Financial sextortion is the fastest-growing cybercrime against children in the United States, and scammers are targeting young people in droves.
This form of blackmail involves predators persuading people to send explicit images or videos, then threatening to release the content unless the person sends them money.
Long gone are the days when urging teens to stay off social media platforms or avoid engaging with strangers online is enough. Experts agree that this approach is outdated, especially given the vast prevalence of the issue.
Plus, sextortion can happen even if the person doesn’t send nude photos. Criminals are utilizing artificial intelligence to create highly realistic deepfake images and videos of victims, or even hack images of real teens to use in their schemes.
Devastatingly, most common victims of financial sextortion are underage, particularly teenage boys ages 14 to 17.
The rise of sextortion during the global pandemic
Financial sextortion has probably been around since the dawn of the internet. But reports of this blackmail have surged since the pandemic, when there was a shift to kids being online more and cybercriminals becoming more effective in their organization and scale.
The FBI issued a public safety alert in 2022 about “an explosion” of sextortion schemes targeting over 3,000 minors that year. Tips to the NCMEC’s CyberTipline increased by over 300% from 2021 to 2023, and the organization says numbers reached an all-time high in 2024.
According to the FBI, financial sextortion is often traced to predators in West African and Southeast Asian countries, particularly Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and the Philippines.
How does sextortion happen?
So what does sextortion look like? Cybercriminals often use similar scripts when interacting with victims. More than half a dozen young men recently detailed their experiences with sextortion to USA TODAY. Here’s just one young man’s story:
Late one Friday night in Indiana, a 24-year-old man started chatting with an attractive girl on a dating app who said she was from Indianapolis. Exploiting the young man’s boredom and loneliness, the girl suggested they swap nude photos. He felt exhilarated at first, but it wasn’t long before the conversation took a dark turn.
The “girl” was actually a cybercriminal in Nigeria, and she quickly threatened to expose his nude photos to his friends and family unless he paid $1,000.
Within minutes, the scammer had found his Facebook profile and compiled a photo collage of their sexts and nudes alongside his college graduation portrait and a screenshot of his phone number and full name.
The young man, tricked and blackmailed, found himself in the middle of a sextortion nightmare.
Shaking with fear, he caved and sent $300. But the sextortion didn’t end there. Just a month later, his fears came to fruition—one of his childhood friends told him she’d received his nude photos in her Facebook spam inbox.
The young man (who wishes to remain anonymous) recalled, “I just felt my blood get hot, and my heart went down to the center of the earth. I can’t even begin to describe how embarrassing and humiliating it was.”
Sextortion typically starts with what seems like an innocent message on social media. The predator then quickly shifts to sexual conversation, and may send unsolicited nudes, followed by pressure for the teen to send their own.
After images are shared, the blackmail starts—scammers will demand money, typically around $500, to delete the images. The scammer pressures the victim into complying, or they’ll send the images to the victim’s friends or family. In some cases, they even threaten to share the images with live-cam porn sites and child porn websites or falsely tell victims they’ll become registered sex offenders.
Criminals will heighten their intimidation tactics by imposing a countdown for how long the victims have to send the money, then spam them with dozens of messages and threats over the preceding minutes or hours. The account sending the messages is often a team of multiple cybercriminals simultaneously contacting the victim, researching their family members, school, and contacts, and handling the money transfer.
The following script used by real scammers was obtained by USA TODAY:
“Hey I have ur nudes and everything needed to ruin your life, I have screenshot all ur followers and tags and those that comment on ur post. If you don’t cooperate with me, I won’t mind going through the stress of sending it to all of them.”
Long-term consequences and mental health effects
That young man who courageously shared his story still grapples with lasting distress from the experience. He cited living with worry that the cyber criminals may track him down again and extort him further.
That fear, shame, and embarrassment often keep victims from telling someone about the blackmail or reporting it to the police. This only fuels the isolation, despair, and hopelessness experienced by victims of these crimes.
Sextortion can lead to serious mental health problems, and even suicide in extreme cases. According to recent FBI figures and a number of private cases, sextortion has been connected to at least 30 deaths of teenage boys by suicide since 2021.
Melissa Stroebel, vice president of research and insights at Thorn—a nonprofit tech organization building tools to defend children from grooming, sextortion, and other forms of sexual abuse— says teens are relying on and sharing more with online friends than physical ones. According to Thorn’s 2023 annual report, 1 in 3 minors reported having an online sexual interaction.
According to NCMEC, 90% of financial sextortion victims are young men ages 14 to 17. Teen boys also have higher risk-taking tendencies regarding romantic and sexual exploration and a lower likelihood of disclosing victimization, making them prime targets for blackmailers. And because boys generally aren’t included as often in prevention efforts, they’re left even more vulnerable.
“It’s really distinctly and disproportionately targeting that community. Criminals are banking on the fact that they might have more success here,” Stroebel says.
Young people respond to decision-making and stress differently, and don’t have the ability to navigate these scams like adults would, particularly because the human brain doesn’t finish developing until about the mid-20s.
Dr. Katie Hurley, senior director of clinical advising for the Jed Foundation, says, “Fear can compound and become very overwhelming in their brains, and then things start to feel bigger and bigger and bigger. Because often the threats are not just to themselves, but to other people they know, it feels like an intense amount of responsibility, and that’s where they get frozen.”
Experiencing abuse early on can also have long-term effects on a person’s ability to establish trust and build healthy relationships with significant others later on in life.
According to Laura Palumbo, communications director for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, victims often develop depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and may be more prone to abuse again online in the future.
There’s also been a surge of victims crying out for support through anonymous channels.
Google searches for “sextortion” have increased fivefold over the last decade. Victims are also turning to Reddit. One of the largest financial sextortion support forms, r/Sextortion, has grown to more than 33,000 on the platform since it was created in 2020. A 2022 study of the thread found that of forum posts that included gender information, 98% were male. The thread’s main moderator, u/the_orig_odd_couple, also says there’s been a noticeable increase in posts from victims under the age of 18 in the past two years.
Warning signs and what to do if you’re a victim
Predators typically send unsolicited nudes within minutes. The following warning signs should raise alarms for teens on social media:
- You don’t share mutual friends with the person from whom you receive a message.
- The person’s profile photos look blurry, unusual, or highly edited (although the accounts can be made to look highly believable, even hacking and curating images from real teens).
- The account has an unusually low or unusually high number of followers.
- Poor grammar or unusual vernacular.
- If a new follower immediately guides the conversation to a romantic or sexual nature.
- The person asks to move the conversation from social media to a private text platform.
If you’ve been sextorted, or if you’re a parent of a teen who has, the first step is to report the predator’s account. Be sure to keep your own account and document all of the messages. A paper trail, including timestamps, can be crucial for identifying the criminal.
Report any attempted sextortion to NCMEC’s CyberTipline, contact your local FBI field office, or report to the FBI at tips.fbi.gov. You can also work to remove the images from the internet through NCMEC’s Take It Down service.
If you’re a teen experiencing sextortion, tell a trusted adult. If you’re experiencing mental health issues or distress, call or text the 988 suicide hotline.
Parents, start by discussing online exploitation early and often. When parents help teens navigate what’s happening, stay calm, and blame the predator (not their child) for what happened, it can help lead to more positive and productive outcomes.
Sextortion can happen to anyone, and it’s crucial to be supportive and sympathetic to those who reach out for help.
The link between porn culture, sharing nudes, and sextortion
It probably goes without saying, but sextortion typically starts with sending nudes, and it’s clear that doing so has become so normalized that when these solicitations come from a predator, it’s probably not all that shocking at first. In fact, criminals are capitalizing on something that’s become so commonplace among teens, and porn culture can’t go without blame.
Porn has become so mainstream and plays a major role in normalizing and sharing nudes—especially among young people. This normalization creates a dangerous environment for sextortion to thrive.
Think about it—explicit content on demand for virtually any and every fantasy has become the standard, so to speak. If it exists, there’s porn of it, and artificial intelligence is making this more true than ever.
Society, and especially young people, are consuming porn and internalizing unrealistic expectations for how they should engage and perform sexually. They’re also experiencing not only pressure but blatant expectation to share explicit content of themselves, and even of others.
Youth are the experiment and often the casualties of today’s unprecedented online world—including the prevalence of sharing nudes and consuming porn.
In 2020, Thorn conducted research involving a survey of a diverse group of over 2,000 minors aged 9 to 17 across the United States. They found that teens and tweens are sending and sharing more nudes than ever, and as if that trend wasn’t worrisome enough, they also found that nude images of younger minors are often shared with adults.
These and other clear findings in the research show that sexting is being normalized among peers, that coercion is playing a critical role in minors taking explicit images of themselves, and that attitudes of blame and shame compound harm to young people.
Thorn also found that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys ages 13 to 17 have shared their own nudes, and a 2018 meta-analysis on sexting showed that 27% of 12-to 17-year-olds receive sexts, and nearly 15% send them.
As Thorn CEO Julie Cordua puts it, ”Puberty and technology are on a collision course, and kids now face situations online that their parents never experienced, at a younger age than most people would think.”
There are serious consequences to sending nudes, including the fact that doing so could fall under US federal “child pornography” laws—those found producing, possessing, or distributing child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) can be charged. There are also personal ramifications, including mental, emotional, and even physical distress or danger.
So why do teens do it?
The reasons may differ between guys and girls. Generally, boys feel more pressure to collect sexts and are more likely to share them with friends or post them online. (Although sextortion cases of boys sending their own nudes are significantly on the rise).
On the other hand, a report from Northwestern University analyzing stories young women posted online found that girls feel the pressure to comply, even though they face a double standard of being called either a “slut” or a “prude,” depending on their response to the request.
Either way, there seems to be a lack of clear understanding of the severity of the consequences that can happen when you send a nude photo of yourself or someone else. Or maybe the understanding is there, but the pressure to comply is so great that engaging in it seems worth the risk.
The rise in sextortion cases is devastating, but not a surprising product of the society mainstream porn has helped create. But as we’re seeing, there are real-world consequences for all involved, and the need for awareness is more urgent than ever.
Understanding this issue is crucial to helping protect everyone affected by today’s online world—including mainstream porn. Young people deserve more than what porn offers them. Their worth isn’t just their body, and they are so much more than sexual objects to be consumed, exploited, and discarded. Healthy, mutually fulfilling relationships are worth fighting for.
Are you a victim of sextortion? There’s help. Check out our Victime resources: https://fightthenewdrug.org/victim-resources/
