Incidents of financial sextortion have exploded over the past few years, with scammers soliciting kids for compromising photos and videos on apps like Instagram and Snapchat and then blackmailing them for cash to keep quiet.
Research conducted by Thorn and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) finds an 82% increase in reports of online enticement between 2021 and 2022 when its hotline received 80,524 reports. The NCMEC now receives an average of 812 reports per week, with more than one-third of them being financially motivated.
"Between 3.5 and 5% of people are believed to have experienced sextortion before reaching adulthood, with girls historically more likely than boys to be impacted," according to the NCMEC, which is now seeing a "surge of cases [targeting] new groups, with 90% of victims detected in NCMEC reports being male, aged 14 to 17."
(Credit: NCMEC)Scammers tend to favor Instagram and Snapchat. The NCMEC says they use these platforms over 75% of the time when making initial contact with victims. Facebook is at third with 7%, followed by Omegle, which shut down last year in part because of a predator problem.
Research shows that 65% of victims were asked to move from a public chat to a private conversation on a different platform. The NCMEC suggests this is to isolate the victim and make it more likely they'll share compromising media. Once the scammer receives it, they'll try to extort money via mobile payment apps like CashApp, Venmo, or PayPal. An increasing number of scammers are also asking for gift cards.
The NCMEC argues that "safeguarding tactics must evolve beyond ‘just don’t share images’ and if you do, 'your life will be ruined.' The threat of life-altering consequences is being weaponized to silence and isolate victims."
The organization is calling on social media websites to improve reporting methods; some platforms make it too difficult and take too long to respond to such inquiries, thus making users of that platform less likely to report issues.
Cases of sextortion have led to some arrests, including two Nigerians whose sextortion schemes allegedly led to the suicide of Jordan DeMay, a 17-year-old teenager from Michigan. Earlier this year, a Delaware woman was arrested for scamming people out of $1.7 million in sextortion cases.