The FBI says it continues to receive reports from victims, including children, tricked into sharing explicit photos and then trapped in a sextortion scheme. Often an imposter sends explicit photos to entice the target to do the same. Once the exchange takes place, blackmail quickly follows.
An 18-year-old Florida man, who asked not to be named, told ABC Action News he recently lost $2,000 in a sextortion trap. His trouble started in November 2022 after a random person posing as a young woman started chatting him up on Instagram.
The teenager says the conversation quickly turned sexual, and the person on the other end used Snapchat to send explicit photos. Then they asked him to return the favor.
“She asked me for an explicit photo. I had sent one, then she had sent another, and then I sent another one,” he said.
One of the two nude pictures included his face. The victim says the person on the other end of the Snapchat conversation took a screenshot of his pictures.
Experts say young people may be less hesitant to share nude pictures on Snapchat, believing the messages quickly disappear from the app. They do, but not when someone has taken a screenshot.
The teen told ABC Action News that’s when he knew he was in trouble. “I looked at my phone, and then I was like to myself, yeah. I messed up, very bad.”
There was never any woman. Only a man threatened to send the nude photos to all of the victim’s social media contacts. The victim sent the blackmailer Cash App payments of almost $2,000 for the next four months. The blackmailer repeatedly threatened to go public with the photos but never did.
St. Pete Police Detective Henry Snowden says the number of sextortion cases doubled in the first five months of this year compared to the same period in 2022. His unit has worked 35 cases since January, one involved a 9-year-old. "For children, we've seen that approximately 67% increase. And for adults, we've seen approximately 47% increase," Snowden said.
According to the FBI, criminals also create fake content by manipulating benign photographs or videos to target victims. “Technology advancements are continuously improving the quality....and accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled content creation,” the agency wrote in a recent press release.
The FBI advises:
- Applying privacy settings on social media to limit your online exposure
- Running online searches of your children to see if anything is out there
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provides a free service known as Take It Down, which could help victims remove or stop sharing sexually explicit content taken while under 18 years old.
- FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov
