Teen Boys Being Threatened With Leaked Naked Photos In Exchange For Money
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A new report finds organized criminals are targeting boys with financial sextortion, but experts say parents can help protect them.
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Fact checked by Sarah ScottFact checked by Sarah ScottSextortion is typically thought of as an issue that girls and women face. A teenager sends her boyfriend explicit pictures, they break up, and he threatens to release her photos if she won’t get back together with him or send more photos.But a new report from the nonprofit organizations Thorn and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) shows that more and more perpetrators are asking for money in what’s called financial sextortion—and they’re targeting boys over girls.“Financial sextortion is looking different than the sextortion cases that we've been following for the last 10 years,” says Melissa Stroebel, the head of research at Thorn, which is dedicated to combatting sexual abuse against children.From August 2022 to August 2023, the NCMEC’s CyberTipline received an average of 812 reports of sextortion per week, according to the report. More than two-thirds involved demands for money. The median amount demanded was $390, and the median paid was $100.Of the financial sextortion victims, 90% were boys between the ages of 14 and 17, according to the report. One reason why offenders might be targeting boys is that they’re less likely to seek support and tell people that they’re being extorted, Stroebel says.The report also looked at where "initial contact" was made. It was often on social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. There were some lesser-known platforms as well like Omegle (which has been shut down) and Wizz. Some of the victims were then asked to move to a secondary, more "private" platform to continue the conversation.
The Impact of Online SextortionAnother unique aspect of recent financial sextortion cases is the boys aren’t being targeted by kids they know. Rather, organized criminals, mostly operating out of Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire, are typically catfishing as teenagers to get their nude photos. Once they have them, they threaten to leak the images, make them go viral, and ruin the boys’ lives if they don’t send money, usually as gift cards or Cash App.“It's involving particularly aggressive threats about life-altering outcomes,” Stroebel says. The offenders say if the boys don’t send money, their leaked nudes could lead to them getting expelled from school, fired from jobs, or even jail time. They pressure victims into sending money quickly so they don’t have time to seek support or consider other options they may have, she says.Beyond money, there are other costs of being a victim of financial sextortion—particularly to mental health. In the 9% of cases the researchers analyzed in which impacts to victims were included, one in six children reported considering suicide or self-harm. Victims “feel incredibly isolated and cut off from hope in terms of things getting better,” Stroebel says.For the report, researchers from Thorn and NCMEC analyzed data on child sextortion cases from August 2021 to August 2023 and reported to NCMEC’s CyberTipline. These were mostly mandated reports from social media platforms but also included some reports from the public.Because of the limits of this study design, Stroebel says the report isn’t able to determine whether financial sextortion is replacing traditional types of sextortion cases of friends and exes targeting girls and young women.Additionally, other studies on sextortion are usually based on victims’ own reports, says David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. That makes the new findings difficult to compare to previous research—like comparing apples to oranges. But he agrees that financial sextortion is on the rise, and boys and young men are the primary targets.Crucially, 11% of the teenagers who were targeted never actually sent explicit pictures to the people making demands of them, but rather the perpetrator threatened them with deepfakes or photoshopped images, like with their head on someone else’s naked body. This threat is only going to increase as generative AI becomes more advanced and easy to use.“This is impacting kids whether or not they share images sometimes, and we can't use that idea of ‘well, my child would never share a nude,’ as a guaranteed defense that they aren't still going to be manipulated into paying someone,” Stroebel says.That said, if a person doesn’t share naked photos, their chances of being victimized are much lower, Finkelhor says.How Parents Can HelpTalking to teenagers about the potential consequences of sharing naked photos—and with younger children about general internet safety—can help them decide not to send explicit photos in the first place. But parents shouldn’t focus on the consequences so much that kids feel like they can’t tell anyone if it happens.“We need them to come away from those conversations thinking that no matter what, they can come to us, we have that open door, and things will get better,” Stroebel says. “We need to have open, frank, early conversations with them before we are in a moment of crisis.”If a child is a victim of sextortion of any variety, NCMEC's Take It Down tool can help remove sexually explicit images of minors from the internet. Thorn also has resources on its website that can help parents have these difficult conversations with their kids. For more Parents news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter! Read the original article on Parents.
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