Law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) have grown increasingly alarmed about the growing threat from sextortion and other crimes targeting teenagers. The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year received 546,000 reports from tech firms of adults across the world soliciting children – a 192% increase from 2023.
As many as 9,600 of these reports came from the UK in the first six months of 2024. Snapchat reported far more troubling material to NCMEC than any other platform in that period, its records show. The children’s charity, NSPCC, described the figures as “shocking” and said they were likely an underestimate.
The NCA has launched what it called “unprecedented” campaigns in the UK to alert teachers, parents and children to the dangers of sextortion, in which victims are blackmailed into sharing abusive, explicit images. The NCA said: “Sextortion is a heartless crime, which can have devastating consequences for victims. Sadly, teenagers in the UK and around the world have taken their own lives because of it.”
Snapchat reported about 20,000 instances of concerning material – including sextortion and child sexual abuse images – in the first half of last year. This is more than the combined number of reports from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Google and Discord. It is understood that Snapchat revised its policies for reporting this content last year and that as a result, subsequent figures will be lower.
Rani Govender, of the NSPCC, said sextortion and other financially motivated sexual crimes had a “devastating” impact on youngsters, affecting their ability to trust or seek help and in some cases leading to suicide. NCMEC said it was aware of “more than three dozen” teenage boys worldwide who had killed themselves after falling victim to sextortion since 2021.
The Guardian has uncovered a 101-page manual giving detailed instructions on how best to exploit young internet users, including advice on the best phones, encryption, apps and alter egos to use. The guide was allegedly produced by a 20-year-old man called Baron Martin from Arizona, US, who was arrested by the FBI in December and calls himself “the king of extortion”. Milo Comerford, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank, said: “The continued accessibility of this kind of chillingly detailed sextortion guide points to the growing risk posed by toxic online communities that exploit and abuse children.”
