What Kids and Teens Need to Know About Sextortion
What is sextortion?
Sextortion describes a crime that happens online when an adult convinces a person who is younger than 18 to share sexual pictures or perform sexual acts on a webcam.
How does it start?
Sextortion can start on any site where people meet and communicate. Someone may contact you while you are playing a game online or reach out over a dating app or one of your social media accounts.
In some cases, the first contact from the criminal will be a threat. The person may claim they already have a picture or video of you that they will share if you don’t send more pictures. More often, however, this crime starts when young people believe they are communicating with someone their own age who is interested in a relationship or someone who is offering something of value. The adult can use threats, gifts, money, flattery, lies, or other methods to get a young person to produce these images.
After the criminal has one or more videos or pictures, they use the threat of sharing or publishing that content to get the victim to produce more images.
The adult has committed a crime as soon as they ask a young person for a single graphic image.
Why do young people agree to do this?
The people who commit this crime have studied how to reach and target children and teens.
One person the FBI put in prison for this crime was a man in his 40s who worked as a youth minister so he could learn how teens talked to each other. Then, he created social media profiles where he pretended to be a teenage girl. This “girl” would start talking to boys online and encourage them to make videos.
Another person offered money and new smartphones to his victims.
In one case, the criminal threatened a girl—saying he would hurt her and bomb her school—if she didn’t send pictures.
Other cases start with the offer of currency or credits in a video game in exchange for a quick picture.