“Sextortion,” when it involves child victims, refers to a form of online enticement of children through which the offender threatens to expose sexual images of a child if the child does not yield to the offender’s demands. In June 2024, Thorn and NCMEC released this analysis of sextortion reports submitted to the CyberTipline from August 2020 to August 2023.
Key findings of the analysis (see page 6) include:
- Sextortion, and particularly financial sextortion, continues to be a major and ongoing threat, with an average of 812 reports of sextortion per week to NCMEC in the last year of data analyzed, and with reason to expect that the vast majority of those reports are financial sextortion.
- Perpetrators leverage tactics to intentionally fan a victim's worry about the life-changing impacts of their nudes being shared — often repeating claims that it will "ruin their life."
- While we find that Instagram and Snapchat are the most common platforms used for sextortion, we observe trends regarding the emergence of additional end-to-end encrypted messaging apps to move victims to secondary platforms and the prevalence of Cash App and gift cards for methods of payment.
- The two countries from which most sextortion perpetrators seem to be operating, Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire, make use of slightly different tactics and platforms.
- Reports submitted by Instagram constitute a clear majority of all reports of apparent sextortion submitted to NCMEC. However, there are reasons to worry not only about whether other platforms are underreporting but also about changes in the level of information provided in reports.
Read more about these findings, the study’s methodology, and additional details regarding victims, offenders, and other aspects of sextortion in the full report here.
