Affiliate Disclaimer Online child financial sextortion is the most rapidly growing crime now. Over the 2023 year, the FBI reported a 1,000% increase in such incidents, including those using AI-generated deepfakes. At least 30 cases ended in child suicides. And experts are sure the real number of victims is far bigger, as many feel shame and fear to report a scam or their suicide wasn’t investigated.
Recently, Meta’s Instagram was criticized because of their failure to act, considering already clear evidence that criminals are using this social platform to sextort teens. They even fired a cyber crime expert who revealed their weak points. What’s going on? Are we one-on-one with online dangers for our kids now?
HeyLocate dived deep into the realm of online crimes against children to know who we should really fight with. We discovered the main online dangers for minors, what sextortion is, and how it is connected with deepfake technology for child abuse. We even dug up the main sextortion criminals, and of course, found out what to do to protect our children.
Anastasia Poida, author and head of content at HeyLocate:
“As a journalist who worked in a news agency and was on the scene of incidents, I know how dirty our world is. As a mom, I understand that we can’t totally separate youth from gadgets and digital life. But what we can do is to be aware of what is going on there to protect them.
So, I went deep into the ever-evolving world of online dangers. I read official reports, different cases of child abuse and sextortion, and stories told by kids, and it was creepy. I saw screenshots of how the offenders ask AI chats to help in creating child porno or deepfake and how they discuss this with “colleagues” on the dark web, and it was disgusting.
Together with that, polls indicate that most people don’t know what sextortion and deepfake are. So, I felt it is my duty to share the issue with HeyLocate readers and all mindful parents. Because forewarned is forearmed.”
Crimes Against Children in Numbers
The difference in numbers for crimes against children in real life and online is striking. In 2022, the Child Maltreatment report fixed an investigation on more than 3 million children about abuse or neglect, with 558,899 proved cases.
- 36,210,368 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation online
- $2,031,485 financial loss from online crimes against children
Still, that’s nothing in comparison to the reports of the public and online electronic service providers, collected by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline. In 2023, there were 36.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation. This proves that the internet remains the most dangerous place for kids.
35.9 million of reports online are about images and videos of suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM), legally referred to as child pornography.
MET Professor of the Practice and Director of Cybercrime Investigation & Cybersecurity Programs Kyung-Shick Choi:
“A growing body of research reveals a profound connection between those possessing CSAM [child pornography] and those committing actual-contact offenses with children. This connection underscores the urgency of addressing this issue, as it poses a serious risk to child safety.”
The danger can lie in inappropriate content as well as in abusers who find new ways to molest children and extort money from them. According to the Internet Crime Report by the FBI, in 2023, there were registered 3.5 times more financial losses from online crimes against minors — $2,031,485 compared to $577,464 in 2022.
Situation by States
In 91.7% of cases, the upload of child sexual abuse material was made by users outside the U.S. This only means that the criminals are not in the USA, but their illegal material was available for kids from everywhere.
Nevertheless, more than 1.1 million reports were referred to the U.S. law enforcement. 63,892 of them NCMEC staff escalated to law enforcement as the reported incident was time-critical in nature (for ex. information about imminent danger for a child). The number of such urgent reports has increased by more than 140%.
The biggest reports’ numbers resolved to the California and Texas states.
Types of Online Child Abuse Reports
There is a substantial growth in the number of reports about unsolicited obscene material sent to a child, child sexual molestation and child sex tourism.
The data comparison of the category of online enticement solely for 2021–2023 years shows a staggering increase of 323%. It’s not the first year when NCMEC analysts have marked a disturbing surge in reports of financial sextortion as one of the contributing factors to that growth.
What Is Sextortion?
Sextortion is a crime in which children and youth are targeted to share explicit photos, which the blackmailer threatens to share with the public.
Financial sextortion is when children are being extorted out of money to stop this. At least 30 of these cases have ended in the suicide of the child.
The new thing about this crime is that sextortion offenders in past years primarily focused on victimizing young girls to procure more explicit images. However, in 2022-2023, there was a marked uptick in instances where boys were coerced into monetary blackmail rather than the exchange of images. Obviously, this explains the 1000% rise in the mentioned financial loss data since 2021.
Sextortion Example: At the beginning of 2024, at least 100 students at several area schools of Aurora, Colorado, became victims of the Instagram sextortion scam. Various IG accounts asked for money in exchange for explicit pictures and extorted victims of the illicit photos.
Overall, from October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations received over 13,000 reports of online financial sextortion of children with at least 12,600 victims (primarily boys 14-17 y.o.).
But in 2023 alone, NCMEC received twice more reports about such cases — 26,718. No less than 30 cases ended with suicides.
Sextortion Example: on March 25, 2022, the Upper Peninsula Michigan high school student Jordan Demay, 17 y.o., started to chat with whom he thought a teenage girl on Instagram, exchanged explicit photos of themselves and was immediately extorted for money. He sent $300 to the blackmailer, who appeared to be a Nigerian man, but that wasn’t enough. In the end, Jordan shot himself just after several hours from the meeting “the girl”.
Obviously, the number of reported cases is still very far from the reality, as the victims are afraid to report them because of the shame and fear. But the analysis of Google searches about sextortion went strikingly high. At the same time, r/Sextortion support community on Reddit surpassed 1 million monthly unique users.
“There are many unsolved cases that we’ll just never know about, — says Paul Raffile, Senior Intelligence Analyst at NCRI. — When there is a teen suicide and the phone is locked, there may never be an investigation to unlock that phone and figure out what happened.”
Deepfake Child Pornography
With the new 2023 report, NCMEC shared its concerns about a growing trend of using generative artificial intelligence (GAI) to create deepfake child pornography. These are sexually explicit images or videos based on any image of a real child or computer-generated children engaged in graphic sexual acts.
Now, an offender doesn’t even need to manipulate a kid to share an explicit photo — they just use a picture available on social media to create an explicit deepfake.
What is a deepfake?
A deepfake is an image or video content created by using artificial intelligence (AI) to alter someone’s face or body so that they appear to be someone else. This technology can manipulate facial expressions, voices, and gestures with startling realism.
Even AI-generated, it’s still a crime, now called generated by artificial intelligence child sexual abuse material (GAI CSAM). In 2023, there were received 4,700 reports of such content, with cases of financial extortion of families with GAI images. One of the minor victims said that the explicit deepfake video was scary real.
Sextortion example with GAI CSAM: One of the NCMEC’s CyberTipline reports contained a threat from the offender to the child victim:
“I recently had an intriguing idea to create a video where you’d be pleasuring yourself on one side of the screen, while looking at photos of your acquaintances on the other side. Using AI and your data it wasn’t hard to make it happen. I was amazed by the outcome. With one click I can send this video to all of your friends via email, social networks and instant messengers. If you don’t want me to do it, sent me $850 in my Bitcoin wallet.”
[from John Shehan, NCMEC’s Senior Vice President’s report to the United States House Committee on March 12, 2024]
The cited above report has numerous examples of the offenders’ chatting with AI and on the dark web about their dirty business.
But what’s disturbing is that there are at least three separate reports about minor boys who used “nudify” and “unclothe” AI apps to create sexually exploitative images of their female classmates based on innocuous images of those on social media. This means that the danger comes not only from the outside but potentially from within individual families and parenting.
Who Is the Offender?
The recent National Contagion Research Institute’s report uncovered the identities behind the most of financial sextortion scams. Nearly all of them are West African cybercriminals known as the Yahoo Boys.
“We’ve been able to track a lot of their groups and messages and even their how-to scripts like how to blackmail kids and cash out money, — explains Paul Raffile, Senior Intelligence Analyst at NCRI. — We’re finding these material openly accessible on YouTube and TikTok, where these criminals are using their real profiles to basically brag about these scams that they are committing against people abroad. This encourages other criminals to engage in this scam, as it is very profitable”.
These instructions on financial sextortion are spread by social media platforms like a cancerous tumor, making it difficult to remove them without leaving “malignant cells” to multiply further and provoke new cases of crime.
For example, in November 2023, Olamide Oladosu Shanu from Nigeria was indicted alongside four accomplices in the largest known financial sextortion scheme to date: they collected over $2.5 million in Bitcoin from victims.
Social Media Where Sextortion Takes Place
Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz are the most common social media platforms where financial sextortion occurs.
Problem of Instagram
Here we come back to the mentioned allegations of NCRI cyber safety experts for Meta. But Instagram is indeed a suitable place for threat actors.
The main problem is the absence of a feature to make followers/following lists private (like on Facebook), so criminals can easily screenshot them and then blackmail a victim to show their explicit images to all their contacts.
“Victims of sextortion on Instagram are astounded by how slowly Meta responds to their reports — Meta frequently responding that the sextortion account “doesn’t violate community guidelines” and refusing to ban the criminal,” — says Paul Raffile.
To be fair, on April 11, 2024, Instagram did introduce new features to prevent financial sextortion, but that includes only notifications about nudity on sent images and reminders of the option to stop the chat.
Danger of Snapchat
After starting a conversation on Instagram and getting the victim’s contact list, the predator usually directs a minor to exchange photos on Snapchat. The platform creates the illusion of anonymity with the feature of disappearing photos. But this is only an illusion.
“Criminals have found out that there are ways to screenshot photos on Snapchat without that notification going off informing the individual that the photo has been screenshotted, — Paul Raffile explains. — Additionally, these scammers are able to send pre-recorded videos that appear to be of a girl on a live video with a red icon, whereas in actuality it’s a pre-recorded video from that scammer’s device.”
Danger of the Wizz App
Wizz is the fast-rising social media platform similar to Tinder but marketed for children 13+. The young Wizz users report dozens of sextortion cases, including those using deepfakes, just within minutes of joining the app and downloading their photo there.
Problem of Parents’ Awareness
One crucial moment in all this is that the provided statistics are the REPORTED only cases. That means these are the only known cases of child abuse. And in 70% of child maltreatment cases in real life, they were reported by professionals — people who have contact with the alleged child maltreatment victim as part of their job. Only 5.8% of the reports were made by parents.
The same with online crimes against kids: 99% of the CyberTipline reports were submitted by online electronic service providers (ESP), and only 1% — by parents, children and those who do care.
This raises many questions. Do parents not notice what is happening to their children? Or do they not know what they should be paying attention to?
How to Notice Sextortion
Foremost, kids shouldn’t start chatting with strangers, with those whom they don’t know in real life or are not sure that the online profile is definitely owned by that person.
It’s better not to share the own explicit photos or videos through the internet at all, as after you tap “Send” you don’t have any control over those images.
Then, children and teens should be cautious of:
- unexpected online encounters that quickly turn to the exchange of nude photos or videos;
- threatens to commit suicide (or any other threat) if they refuse to send such images;
- any payment offered to get nude photos or videos of them: money, online game credits or codes, cryptocurrency, etc.;
- offering the possibility of a modeling contract in exchange for a “quick picture” to evaluate the “candidate”;
- such offenders commonly make first contact on one platform, then ask to move to a second or third platform that uses encrypted messaging to make tracking their crimes more difficult.
If sextortion is already occurring, pay attention to the changes in the child’s behavior: becoming withdrawn, moody, or irritable, changes in eating or sleeping habits.
FBI Charlotte Special Agent in Charge Robert M. DeWitt:
“Sometimes we have seen kids stooping into depression, isolating themselves, and committing self-harm[…]. Parents need to be intentional with their children when they give them a device. They need to know what that device is, what applications are on that device, and who their children are communicating with and explain to them about the dangers.
Perpetrators understand how to manipulate and communicate with our kids. It’s their full-time job”.
How to Stop Sextortion
“Pay and forget” doesn’t work with sextortion. If a person has already sent their explicit photo or video, or if an offender has already created it with AI, sextortion may never stop even after the payment. Thus:
- Report sextortion to the CyberTipline.
- Save all messages and conversations with an offender, even if they are shameful.
- Do not pay the offender.
- Report to Take It Down project that helps remove explicit photos or videos of the minors from the internet.
How to Protect Children From Sextortion
If you think that your kid will never send anyone their own nude photos, think twice. Sextortion affects children of both genders and crosses all ethnic and socioeconomic groups. The FBI has interviewed victims as young as 8, honor-roll students, the children of teachers, student athletes, etc. The only common trait among victims is internet access.
According to Snapchat internal data, 31% of teens who are approached by a sextortion offender ultimately share an explicit photo.
Why do children fall victim to sextortion?
“This generation is too different from the previous ones. It is grown up by and with social media. Perhaps the problem is their low self-esteem, which depends on social media; they find their validation there. Their main emotional support is online. Their lives rely on online”,
— explains Catherine Connell, unit chief of the Child Victim Services Unit at the FBI.
So, how to prevent sextortion?
- Open communication is a key for parents and children here. The shame and embarrassment that a kid or teen feels during sextortion is what prevents them from sharing the issue with parents and sometimes leads to suicide.
Talk with children about sexuality, consent, and online safety. Adapt the topics based on their maturity level. It’s normal for teens to be curious about sex, but teach them to think about the long-term consequences of their deeds.
Avoid judgmental or blaming responses. Reassure them that they can turn to you if sextortion happens. - Role-play potential scenarios they might encounter online, such as dealing with unwanted offers or threats. Encourage children to think critically about their actions and seek help before sharing any explicit images online.
- Keep tabs on the online life and friends of your children. You may consider limiting the time your kids spend online or using parental control settings. Some phone trackers for parental control allow monitoring social media, all SMS, and calls on the kid’s phone.
- Set children’s social media and messenger accounts to Private to prevent strangers from chatting with them.
Insights and Perspectives
Obviously, we can’t change a world that’s only getting worse. Even new technologies, like AI, end up being used for evil. But protecting children from all this is not just in our power; it’s our responsibility.
“Over its four decades of protecting children from exploitation, NCMEC has witnessed how the misuse of technology and the failure to properly regulate and incorporate safety by design concepts when new technology emerges can cause catastrophic dangers to children online.
GAI technology is expanding and growing more sophisticated and accessible at an incredibly fast rate, making it crucial for Congress and child-serving professionals to closely monitor the implications on child safety and to address legislative/regulatory gaps and needed mandatory best practices”.
[testimony “Addressing Real Harm Done by Deepfakes,” by John Shehan, NCMEC’s Senior Vice President, Exploited Children Division & International Engagement]
On May, 7th, president Biden officially signed the REPORT Act into law about protecting children from online sexual exploitation. It is the first time that websites and social media platforms are legally obligated to report crimes related to federal trafficking, grooming, and enticement of children to the NCMEC CyberTipline. The law doesn’t solve the problem entirely, but will help substantially in investigating the cases of CSAM.
The rest is in the hands of parents. Don’t leave children alone with a phone, tablet, or computer. Monitor their online lives just as you monitor their physical health and safety. Educate yourself and kids about digital safety and stay aware of potential risks posed by the dark net of the internet. Your kids should not be the next in such disturbing statistics.
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