Trends in Financial Sextortion: An investigation of sextortion reports in NCMEC CyberTipline data Research

By Thorn in partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Sextortion — threatening to expose sexual images of someone if they don’t yield to demands — has been a source of harm to youth for some time, but it has gained added urgency in recent years. Over time, several studies have examined how this abuse takes shape, its prevalence, and those impacted. Importantly, while sextortion can affect all ages, this report focuses explicitly on the sextortion of minors. Between 3.5% and 5% of people are believed to have experienced sextortion before reaching adulthood, with girls more likely than boys to be impacted. Historical surveys have found demands most often were sexual or relational in nature, including but not limited to demands for additional intimate imagery, engaging in sexual acts, or returning or staying in a romantic relationship. Research has also found the source of threats is mixed, with roughly half coming from people in a victim’s offline community, such as acquaintances or romantic partners/ex-partners, and the other half involving people they met online. In the last several years, concerns about a unique form of sextortion — financial sextortion — have been on the rise. Distinct from more often observed forms of sextortion, which frequently impacted girls and involved demands that were sexual or relational in nature, financial sextortion appears to more often impact boys and involves demands specifically for money. In addition, financial sextortion marks the emergence of new organized endeavors leveraging the internet to engage in financial sextortion at scale. In both cases, the impact on children can be devastating, leading to severe trauma and, in extreme cases, suicide due to sextortion. Older surveys of sextortion victims found that 12% reported they “moved to a new neighborhood, community or town” and that 24% reported that they “saw a mental health or medical practitioner as a result of the incident.” The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has received more than 144 million reports, as of year-end 2022,6 of possible online child sexual exploitation, including sextortion, and was among the first organizations to raise alarms about the rise of financial sextortion. This report provides a deep dive into the reports submitted to NCMEC 

regarding sextortion, with a focus on the evolving trend of financial sextortion. The overall trend in NCMEC reports shows a large wave of sextortion cases since the beginning of 2022. Although the numbers do not, on their face, differentiate among types of sextortion, analysis of report details demonstrates this increase is largely driven by reports involving financial sextortion. Figure 1 outlines the rates of all reports made to NCMEC and categorized as sextortion, showing an average of 812 reports of sextortion per week in the last year of data analyzed (from August 2022 to August 2023) and 559 reports/week in the last two years of data (from August 2021 to August 2023), which come from reports submitted to NCMEC by the public, as well as many cases identified by Electronic Service Providers (ESPs) such as social media platforms, listed as “from platform.” These rates have many details and limitations, which we measure through sampling and manual coding. Furthermore, there are limitations due to the nature of the reports submitted to NCMEC. 

. For example, although we find that the vast majority of cases submitted in this period are financial in nature, we cannot know how much of this is due to cases, particularly nonfinancial sextortion, being underreported. These numbers should not be viewed as vague statistics, but rather should be viewed as being many specific cases of children being targeted and extorted by perpetrators seeking to amplify their fears and for them to give in to demands. This report focuses on the chat logs and incident descriptions in these reports because they provide insight into how these incidents unfold and into the situation in which victims find themselves when they experience sextortion. 

  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.  

Thorn, 2024. 37p.