It was a phone call that has become all too common for Childline counsellors in recent months.
The 17-year-old said he was scared and didn’t know what to do. A “girl” had contacted him on social media, claiming to be his age. After an exchange of messages, he had sent her an intimate image. And then the blackmail demands began.
This is financial sextortion, a worrying trend in online fraud targeting British teenagers.
Rebekah Hipkiss, the Childline supervisor who took the call, says the frequency of these contacts with victims of financial sextortion is daily and has increased “massively” over the past 12 months. In the past year, Childline has detected more than 100 cases of financial sextortion – the first data it has collected since a specific code was assigned to these types of incidents.
Hipkiss says teenagers who contact Childline feel embarrassed about having been tricked and are worried that their friends and family, who may be listed on the teenager’s social media profile, will receive the images they are being blackmailed over.
“What we are worried about is the emotional impact this has had on them,” says Hipkiss, who works at Childline’s London headquarters. “They feel extremely foolish, they feel very ashamed. They are worried that their family and friends will find out.” She adds: “Sometimes they have paid money, sometimes they haven’t.”
Childline, part of the children’s charity NSPCC, also operates a service that can remove indecent images of children from the internet (such as images of sextortion victims) if they have been posted online and allows victims to report images or videos anonymously. It also aims to prevent them from being posted on platforms.
The Report Remove service creates a hash, or “fingerprint,” of any image uploaded to it. This fingerprint is then distributed across major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, Google, and Snapchat, with the aim of blocking that image from being uploaded to those services or removing it if it has been posted, as well as preventing it from being uploaded again in the future. Report Remove works in conjunction with child safety watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation.
Gawain Griffiths, Childline’s website manager, says children who contact the service to report incidents of sextortion are given information about the Report Remove platform as part of a support package. “Report Remove is a really useful tool for young people because it helps them to take back control of their images when someone tries to take them away,” he says.
Griffiths says that over the past six months, as sophisticated AI image-generating tools have become more widely available, Childline has been receiving more calls from teenagers who have been sent, without prior contact, fake and indecent images of themselves and are threatened with blackmail for publishing them.
“It’s an attack where someone has sent an AI-generated image or a fake image and said that if you don’t send me money or send me another nude, they will share it with other people,” he said.
In one case heard by a Childline counsellor, a 15-year-old girl said a stranger had made a “really convincing” fake nude of her that used her face and bedroom, apparently taken from her Instagram account. Childline said the “naked” images were usually made with the victim’s face transposed onto someone else’s body. In another apparent case of artificial intelligence, a 14-year-old boy sent some photos of his face to a girl he had met online and they were used to make a deepfake pornographic video.
“This person used some kind of deepfake artificial intelligence to make a pornographic video with my face. Now they are demanding money from me and saying that if I don’t pay, my life will end. I know it’s not me in the video, but it looks very real,” the boy told Childline.
In the most typical cases, Griffiths says, the initial contact turns threatening as soon as the victim is tricked into sending an image. “Once that image or video is shared, the response is very quick,” he says. In financial sextortion, it becomes a “very cold, almost business-like approach” along the lines of “you have to give me this money or I will send it to people you know,” while indicating that they know how to contact their parents or friends.
One sextortion victim, a 16-year-old boy, told a Childline counsellor he feared he would have to change schools if intimate photos were posted. “I met someone online and sent them a naked photo,” the teenager said in quotes Childline has anonymised. “Now they are blackmailing me into giving them money – they say they will share the photo if I don’t send them money. I don’t know who they are in real life. I am very worried about my friends and family finding out and judging me. I feel like I would have to change schools if any of my friends found out.” “On the image.”
Another 16-year-old boy told Childline that he was tricked into using a fake account with a profile picture of “some random girl smiling”. “It never occurred to me at the time that the photos could belong to someone else,” he said.
An 18-year-old boy said a girl contacted him on Discord, a chat app focused on video games, and struck up a conversation about gaming — “I can’t lie, it was nice to have things in common” — that turned unpleasant once he sent some nude photos. “Eventually, I got a call from a number I thought belonged to the girl, but instead it was a man with a foreign accent. By that point, it was too late: they already had my nude photos,” he said.
Other victims have told Childline they have been contacted on Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz, and in some cases asked to move to a private messaging app where communications become increasingly sexualised before being asked to send intimate photos or videos. In one case heard by Childline, a 16-year-old boy was sent semi-nude photos on a private messaging platform and then told it was his turn to return the favour. He sent two nudes and was then immediately asked for £100 or else the images would be sent to his followers.
In other cases Childline has heard, teenagers have sent money to a sextortion scammer to be asked for more – figures quoted on helplines range from £20 to £3,000. Childline advises victims, following advice from the National Crime Agency, not to pay the scammer and to block them on social media, although they should avoid deleting anything that could be used as evidence.
Griffiths says her advice to teens isn’t to avoid online interaction altogether, but to understand and set their own boundaries. “It’s about understanding your boundaries,” she says. “It’s about understanding that if you’re talking to someone and they ask you to do something, you need to take a moment and think about it.”
