Understanding the Risks of Sextortion

What is Sextortion?

Sextortion is a serious crime that occurs when someone threatens to distribute your private and sensitive material if you don't provide them with images of a sexual nature, sexual favors, or money. The material could be photos or videos that you've shared during an online relationship, or content that has been obtained by hacking.

Unlike some other online dangers, sextortion primarily targets children and teenagers, with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) processing 556 sextortion reports per week in early 2024. The FBI reports an average of more than one suicide per month due to sextortion. This alarming trend has been declared a "national crisis" by law enforcement agencies.

How Sextortion Typically Happens

Sextortion often follows a predictable pattern, which makes it somewhat preventable if you know what to look for:

1. Initial Contact: The perpetrator reaches out through social media, gaming platforms, or dating apps, often posing as a teenager of similar age.
2. Trust Building: They establish a friendship or romantic interest over days or weeks, creating a sense of trust.
3. Moving Platforms: They try to move the conversation to platforms with more privacy or less monitoring (like WhatsApp or Snapchat).
4. Requesting Images: After building trust, they ask for photos or videos, often starting with innocent requests before escalating to demands for explicit content.
5. The Threat: Once they have compromising material, they threaten to share it with the victim's friends, family, or publish it online unless they receive payment (usually in gift cards or cryptocurrency) or more explicit content.

The entire process can happen in less than 24 hours in some cases, particularly with teenage boys who may be more easily persuaded by attractive female profiles.

The Nigerian Scam of Today

This is the modern version of the Nigerian prince scam. Instead of Nigerian princes asking you to wire them money, now the scammers use social media and Snapchat to target high school kids. They use scripted attacks to take advantage of their targets and they are very effective. These scammers have narrowed in on how to manipulate core biological drives to trap their victims and they are able to do it at scale. They have fine-tuned the scripts that work best and they distribute their best practices to fellow scammers.

The scale of these operations is large. Meta not only removed 63,000 individual accounts but also took down Facebook groups and pages that were trying to organize, recruit, and train new scammers.

Warning Signs Parents Should Watch For

Children who become victims of sextortion often exhibit certain behavioral changes:

• Becoming secretive about online activity
• Appearing anxious or distressed after using devices
• Suddenly closing apps or switching screens when adults approach
• Receiving messages or calls from unknown contacts
• Spending unusual amounts of time online, especially late at night
• Becoming withdrawn, anxious, or depressed
• Asking for money or gift cards without a clear explanation

How to Prevent Sextortion

What sets sextortion apart from other common risks is both its frequency and its preventability. Sextortion typically requires two key elements: online chat and a camera. Without both of these elements, sextortion cannot succeed.

Beyond disabling cameras, here are additional steps parents can take:

1. Have Regular, Open Conversations

Talk with your children about online safety regularly, not just once. Ensure they understand that they should never share personal information or images online, even with someone they believe they know and trust. Use age-appropriate language and examples.

2. Establish Clear Guidelines

Set clear rules for device use, including:

• Which apps and platforms are allowed
• Who they can communicate with online
• What information they should never share
• When and where devices can be used
• No device use in private areas like bedrooms and bathrooms, especially at night

3. Use Technical Safeguards

Implement appropriate parental controls and monitoring software. For younger children, this might include more extensive oversight, including removing chat systems entirely. For teenagers, focus on communication platforms and establish trust-based monitoring.

Remember the readiness principle: If your child is not mature enough for conversations about sextortion and online safety, they are not ready for an internet-connected camera.

4. Address School-Issued Devices

For school-issued devices, ask district administrators to disable the camera via their device management system - it's a simple setting change with no budget impact. Schools put children at risk by leaving cameras enabled. Contact your school's principal to facilitate communication with the district superintendent and IT department.

What to Do If Your Child Becomes a Victim

If you discover your child is being victimized by sextortion, taking immediate action is critical:

1. Don't panic or blame. Your child needs support, not judgment.
2. Stop all communication with the perpetrator immediately. Do not delete any messages or evidence.
3. Report to the FBI. File a report at FBI.gov/sextortion. Be aware that many local police departments may not be trained on how to handle these situations, so contacting federal agencies like the FBI is often more effective.
4. Contact NCMEC for help removing photos at 1-800-THE-LOST or gethelp@ncmec.org.
5. Report to the platform. Report the account to the social media platform where the contact occurred.
6. Get mental health support. The psychological impact can be severe; seek professional help if your child shows signs of distress, depression, or suicidal thoughts.
7. Do not pay the ransom. Paying rarely stops the demands and may actually increase them.

Conclusion: Building Digital Resilience

What makes sextortion unique is how preventable it is with a single technical change. While we can't eliminate all risks in our children's lives, we can drastically reduce the risk of camera-based sextortion by disabling camera access on their devices.

Rather than teaching fear of technology, we're teaching defensive digital citizenship. Just as we teach defensive driving rather than banning teens from cars, we're teaching safe technology use through appropriate boundaries.

Just as you buckle their seatbelts without a second thought, disabling their camera access should become an equally automatic safety measure. This may sound extreme, but remember that teenagers are the most vulnerable to these scams even though it might otherwise seem safe for them to have an internet-connected camera.