Report Details Changing Nature of Financial Sextortion; Teenage Boys Majority Victims
Teenage boys make up most victims of financial sextortion, and parents and law enforcement are urged to be on the lookout.
That’s according to a new report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Thorn, a tech nonprofit dedicated to stopping child sexual abuse. The report studied child exploitation reports submitted to NCMEC from 2020 to 2023.
Sextortion is when a criminal tricks a victim into sending sexually explicit images, and then threatens to expose those images if they don’t yield to the criminal’s demand.
While sextortion traditionally targeted teenage girls, with the perpetrators knowing the victim and demanding some sort of sexual favor, the report found that 14-17-year-old teenage boys now make up 90 percent of sextortion victims, with criminals demanding money, and the attackers living overseas in organized gangs.
“Financial sextortion marks the emergence of new organized endeavors leveraging the internet to engage in financial sextortion at scale,” stated the report.
The report found that in the last year of study, there was a huge spike in sextortion reports, with NCMEC receiving an average of 812 a week. More than two-thirds of those crimes were likely financially motivated, leaving the victims emotionally devastated, and in extreme cases, leading to suicide.
Global Scammers
Most of the schemes were conducted from organized networks out of Nigeria and Cote D’Ivoire, a noted change in sextortion crimes.
“Grooming in other scenarios would take place over the course of days, weeks, or months, even, to be able to garner someone’s trust,” said Lauren Coffren, Executive Director of the Exploited Children at NCMEC to Fast Company. “Now, it’s happening within minutes and hours.”
The report said that scammers used fake accounts to “catfish” victims, posing as a young person and tricking them into sending explicit pictures. The scammers then used scripts to threaten the victim, often by threatening to post it on Instagram or another social network.
Platforms Questioned
According to the report Instagram and Snapchat were the most common platforms for initial contact, with Instagram the point of contact in 45 percent of cases, and Snapchat the point of contact in 31 percent of cases.
Sometimes the perpetrators tried to move the conversation to another platform like WhatsApp, GChat, and iMessage.
The report noted that there are differences in the ways companies reported sextortion cases.
Researchers found that Snapchat submitted a quarter of sextortion reports as Instagram, although Snapchat has recently started improving its reporting process, and Snapchat noted that Instagram is a much larger platform.
“We know that sextortion is a risk teens and adults face across a range of platforms, and have developed tools and resources to help combat it,” a Snap spokesperson told NBC News.
An Instagram spokesperson noted, “We work aggressively to fight this abuse and support law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting the criminals behind it.”
Congressional Action
This issue has been an ongoing discussion area in Congress, and there are several pending bills.
The STOP CSAM Act would allow victims to sue tech platforms that promote or facilitate child exploitation. The Kids Online Safety Act would create a “duty of care” to protect children from online harms.
And in May, President Biden signed the REPORT Act into law. That legislation requires online service providers to submit reports of suspected crimes against children, including sex trafficking and other forms of online exploitation.