An 18,000% increase: Sextortion is targeting and killing teenagers

It has been nearly 13 years since Amanda Todd posted her heart-wrenching story on YouTube. 

Moving slowly through a series of flashcards held up in front of her, the 15-year-old teen from Port Coquitlam, BC, told how she had been blackmailed into exposing her breasts online. She wrote about bullying, about feeling alone. 

“I have nobody. I need someone,” one of her final cards read. 

A month later, in the fall of 2012, she died by suicide.

The video went viral worldwide following her death, sparking an international conversation about cyberbullying and the need to increase safeguards online. The RCMP launched a criminal investigation—Aydin Coban, a Dutch-Turkish man, was eventually charged for sexually extorting Todd, after it was found he blackmailed her for more explicit images, threatening to send the images to others at her school—which he eventually did. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison in October 2022 (a Dutch judge later reduced the sentence to six years, to be served consecutively with an 11-year sentence for sextorting 33 other victims). 

The Government of Canada introduced new cyberbullying and revenge porn legislation in 2013 which went into effect two years later.

While amending the Criminal Code, it did nothing to address one of the main issues in Todd’s death—and what is contributing to a tragic number of teenage deaths across the globe—a lack of accountability in the tech sector. 

“It is a systemic abuse of platform safety gaps and how criminals are basically able to operationalize and scale their abuse on these platforms,” Paul Raffile, an expert on sextortion told attendees of a recent webinar hosted by the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). 

These gaps have allowed this crime to surge at an alarming rate. Since the end of 2021, the number of reports of sextortion has increased an unfathomable 18,000 percent—from 139 cases in the fourth quarter of 2021 to over 26,000 in 2023. 

Since the end of 2021, reports of sextortion sent to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) increased 18,000 percent.

(National Centre on Sexual Exploitation)

In Todd’s case, it was a live streaming service online. A lack of age-restrictions or safeguards meant any child looking to talk with strangers anywhere in the world was capable of doing so.

Today, research shows the most common platforms sextortion begins on are Instagram and Snapchat—two of the most widely used social media apps for young people.

Features on both of these platforms make it easy for these scammers—often linked to large organized criminal networks Raffile says—to hide behind anonymous profiles. In some cases, features on the app facilitate the blackmail by allowing scammers to quickly connect with the friends and family of their victim.

How does it work?

In the majority of cases, a teenager—often young men—are contacted via Instagram by a person posing as a young, attractive woman. These fake profiles are increasingly becoming more convincing, with large friend groups and contacts visible on their profile giving them their air of legitimacy. 

“I know all the usual tells of a scam like this but the scammer made it very believable, they had normal amount of followers on insta, a high snapscore and a consistent face from the snaps. So, I was convinced that it wasn't a scam. I was wrong,” one user wrote on a Reddit forum dedicated to victims of this crime. The number of users in this forum has skyrocketed from about 6,300 members in November 2022 to over 34,000 today. It mirrors the explosion in reports of this crime recorded globally in a few short years.

After the scammer makes contact through this fake profile, they then trick the teen into exchanging sexually explicit images or videos—usually by sending one first (the image has usually been taken from somewhere online).

“Immediately after receiving the sexual content, the sextorter makes their demands,” the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) explains on its website. “If a young girl is victimized, the sextorter typically demands additional sexual photos and videos. If the sextorter targets a boy, they almost always demand money instead.”

The C3P receives, on average, seven reports of sextortion every single day. Between September 1, 2023 and August 31, 2024, the organization recorded more than 2,600, with 83 percent of the victims being young men, mostly being extorted through contacts made on Instagram or Snapchat.

Once the extorter has the explicit image, they immediately demand money or more images, threatening to send the nude picture to the victim’s friends or family, or post it elsewhere online. The extorter will often share screenshots of the victim’s contact list or other identifying information to scare them into complying.

This threat alone has led to a rash of teen suicides in North America. Since the increase in this crime began at the end of 2021, the United States has recorded 44 teen suicides linked to sextortion. In one case, it only took 27 minutes from when the teen was first contacted to them dying by suicide.

The U.S.-based Network Contagion Research Institute calls sextortion incidents a 'digital pandemic'. 

William Doiron of New Brunswick was 16 when he ended his life in 2022 while being sextorted after connecting with someone on Snapchat. Harry Burk, a student at Souris Regional School in PEI died by suicide in 2023, hours after chatting with a scammer on Snapchat. A 14-year-old boy in Surrey B.C. in 2023, a 12-year-old in Prince George in the same year, both took their own lives after being sextorted online. 

“It’s a public safety emergency,” Raffile said. 

In February 2023, the FBI issued a warning after recording what it described as an “explosion” of financial sextortion across the globe. 

“In 2022, the FBI received thousands of reports related to the financial sextortion of minors, primarily boys, representing an exponential increase from previous years,” the release reads. “Unfortunately, the FBI is also aware of more than a dozen suicides following these incidents.”

While teens continue to die, governments move at a glacial pace to institute reforms and tech companies fight them at every turn—despite the products they are creating and making available to teens (products that have been proven to be addicting) are actively killing them. 

“No other product that harmed this many kids would be allowed to stay on the shelf,” Shelby Knox, the Director of Tech Accountability Campaigns with advocacy organization Parents Together told the NCOSE webinar. “The longer these platforms go unregulated, the more kids die.”

A Reddit forum (r/Sextortion) dedicated to victims of the crime, has seen a startling spike in posts and membership, mirroring the trend seen across the globe.

(C3P)

Existing features on both Instagram and Snapchat have been shown through survivor testimony to assist scammers in facilitating their abuse. For example, the “Quick Add” feature which shows the user accounts that could be connected to them in some way, like through a mutual friend. Survivors told C3P this feature was how they first connected with their extorter. Once the extorter has connected with their target, this feature will then continue to facilitate the abuse by serving up the accounts of friends or other close contacts of the person they are trying to victimize—making their eventual threats to share the nude images more real.

Both Instagram and Facebook have similar functions, and even when the user’s account is private, their list of followers can be viewed by anyone the user allows to follow them. 

“With minimal effort, extorters have unfettered access to other users connected to their victim, and the opportunity to carefully curate their accounts to appear more authentic by establishing mutual connections,” the C3P writes. 

The C3P has recommended forcing social media platforms to ensure that accounts for users under the age of 18 are private by default. Instagram implemented this recommendation  in September of last year, launching a “Teen Account” option that is “automatically set to more protective teen settings”. The feature is only available in certain locations, with the Instagram website stating the feature should be universal by early 2025. C3P also recommends eliminating features that push users to share personal information—such as their real-time location, like the Snapchat “Snap Map” feature. Platforms should have reporting options specific to blackmail and extortion, the C3P recommends, and ensure those options are responsive “and capture the seriousness of users being aggressively and actively targeted.”

These common sense measures are not unheard of. TikTok, which boasts over 1 billion active users, only allows direct messaging for registered account holders over the age of 16. Also, content created outside of the app cannot be shared through direct messaging—making it an impractical place for sextorters to implement their tactics. 

Parents Together has been pushing what Knox describes as “safety by design” bills in the U.S. that will force tech companies to install basic safety features to protect teens from the dangers the apps are currently exposing them to. 

This danger includes scammers creating multiple fake accounts on the same platform, even recycling the same image and names to operate multiple accounts at the same time. In November 2022, the C3P reported that Cybertip.ca analysts discovered 19 Instagram accounts that had been used to extort victims—all using the same profile picture of a young woman.

“This suggests social media platforms are failing to intercept relatively obvious patterns used by extorters,” the C3P states in its report. “These findings highlight the need for enhanced safety and privacy features as well as better reporting mechanisms to combat the increase in sexual violence occurring online.”

Cybertip.ca analysts found 19 different Instagram accounts with the same image (shown above) were being used simultaneously to extort victims.

(C3P)

Canada’s latest attempt to regulate tech companies into improving the safety of their apps was the Online Harms Act. A controversial bill from the start, the first part of the proposed legislation would have created a regulatory scheme to hold social media companies accountable for reducing user exposure to harmful content on their platforms. “Harmful” was defined as content that “sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, intimate content communicated without consent, content used to bully a child, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and content that incites violent extremism or terrorism.”

The Act would have seen the creation of a Digital Safety Commissioner to administer the new framework and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada, who would act as a key advocate for online safety. 

None of this will happen. After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation and prorogued Parliament earlier this year, the Bill died.

“The technology is moving so quickly, and the legislation moves so slowly that we are challenged to keep up with it, no doubt,” MP Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock) previously told The Pointer. Viersen had introduced a private members bill, the Stop Internet Exploitation Act, but it will also die on the Order Paper following the prorogation of Parliament. His legislation was a response to the lack of action from the Liberal government following weeks of disturbing testimony in 2022 at parliamentary committee revealed widespread exploitation and child pornography on PornHub, the world’s most popular pornographic website.

“The government responded and said we’ll introduce legislation within three weeks, it’s been three years now and we still don’t have any legislation,” Viersen told The Pointer in late 2023. He questioned whether lobbying efforts by tech companies were slowing down the process. 

“There’s lot of money sloshing around this issue and they are working hard to diminish the stature of the story,” he said. “They are paying to make it go away.”

During testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2024, the gap between what advocates believe needs to change, and the attitude of social media’s top leaders, was abundantly clear. Evan Spiegel, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Snap Inc. and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta were among the company executives called to testify. The general message from these industry executives was that these issues were top of mind, and all of them were applying dedicated resources to address things like sextortion, underage content and other forms of exploitation. It was clear many Senators were frustrated by the cavalier tone of many responses from the executives.

“If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem, we’re going to die waiting,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said. 

“It’s all double talk,” Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said. 

Until the gaps are closed, the C3P has created a long list of dedicated resources for parents and teens to better understand this crime and what to do if their child falls victim. These include the revamped ProtectKidsOnline.ca, the Parenting in the Online World Booklet and an Online Risks and Trends video.  

“Ongoing safety conversations are necessary in today’s world,” Noni Classen, director of education at C3P stated in a press release on February 11—Safer Internet Day. “As the internet is an unregulated space that is constantly evolving, we are here to help make it easier for parents navigating online safety by providing a one-stop shop to find information and help.”

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