If this is happening right now, skip to what to do. Your child is not in trouble, you have not failed, and this is recoverable.
If you are reading this in advance — good. That is the whole point of this page. Most parents have never heard the word, the thing itself moves in hours rather than weeks, and the single most effective protection any parent has is free and takes ten seconds to say.
It is also worth naming what makes this one frightening in a way other online risks are not: it targets confident, ordinary teenage boys who would tell you they are far too sensible to fall for anything. That is not a flaw in your son. It is how the thing is built.
Say this to your child this week
“If someone ever gets a photo of you and threatens you with it, my first move will be to help you. Always. You will not be in trouble.”
That is the whole intervention. Shame is the mechanism that does the damage: children pay, panic and stay silent because they believe they will be blamed. Ninety-four per cent of reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children come from the child or their parent, and most are filed by the children themselves — which only happens in families where the child already believes they will be helped.
What it is and how big it is
An adult, usually posing as a girl of about the same age, persuades a boy to send an explicit image, then immediately threatens to send it to his family, his school and his friends unless he pays.
NCMEC logged more than 50,000 reports of financially motivated sextortion in 2025 — an average of 137 a day, up from over 36,000 the year before. That is a 37% rise in daily reports in one year. Their CyberTipline took 21.3 million reports in total, with online enticement up 158%.
At least three dozen teenage boys in the United States have taken their own lives as a result of this. The FBI's alerts describe the primary targets as boys aged 14 to 17, with the youngest victim they interviewed aged ten, and offenders operating largely from Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire.
Thorn surveyed 1,200 young people aged 13 to 20: one in four had experienced sexual extortion as a minor. Among LGBTQ+ teenagers it was 36%, twice the rate of their peers. Of those affected, 44% blocked the account, 23% told a parent, and 16% never told anyone at all. 18% sent more images. 15% harmed themselves. 7% paid.
The warning signs
A new online contact who offers money, game credits or gift cards for images. Someone who moves the conversation quickly to another app. A claim to already have compromising material. A profile that looks like a peer but is new. Escalation to explicit requests within hours rather than weeks.
If it is happening right now
Do not pay. NCMEC is explicit: cooperating or paying rarely stops the blackmail. It usually produces a second demand.
Block, but do not delete. The messages, the profile and the account name are evidence. Screenshot before you block.
Report it. NCMEC CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org, or gethelp@ncmec.org, or 1-800-843-5678. The FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or tips.fbi.gov.
Use Take It Down. It is NCMEC's free service for getting explicit images of under-18s removed from participating platforms.
Tell your child, out loud, that this is not their fault. The FBI's own framing is that the offender is to blame. An adult did this to a child, and the child was targeted by a professional.
Michael has spent much of his working life online—and much of the rest of it trying to stop that technology taking over. He has thrown a phone into a lake, locked devices in boxes and experimented with long periods offline. He writes about what helped, what failed and how to keep the useful parts of digital life.
Last updated 9 August 2026. This page is checked and corrected as new research comes out. If you spot something out of date or wrong, tell me and I will fix it.