By Olivier Acuña Barba •
Published: 09 Aug 2025 • 23:03
• 2 minutes read
Sextortion is a crime that destroys children’s and teenagers’ lives and sometimes leads to suicide | Credit: nito/Shutterstock
Snapchat logged about 20,000 cases last year of adults grooming children online, more than other social media platforms combined. This year, Tech companies, including Snapchat and Facebook, reported more than 9,600 cases of adults grooming children online in the UK in just six months last year – the equivalent of about 400 a week.
The FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), among others, have expressed their increasing alarm over the growing threat from sextortion and other crimes targeting teenagers, the Guardian reported on Saturday, August 9th.
The US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received 546,000 reports from tech firms of adults across the world soliciting children – a 192 per cent increase in 2024 compared to 2023.
Heartless crime with devastating effects
“Sextortion is a heartless crime which can have devastating consequences for victims. Sadly, teenagers in the UK and around the world have taken their own lives because of it,” said the NCA in an official statement.
Tech by US law is responsible for alerting suspicious material to NCMEC. The figures show that Snapchat reported about 20,000 instances of concerning material – including sextortion and child sexual abuse images – in the first half of last year.
Rani Govender, of the NSPCC, said sextortion and other financially motivated sexual crimes had a “devastating” impact on youngsters, affecting their ability to trust or seek help and in some cases leading to suicide.
NCMEC said it was aware of “more than three dozen” teenage boys worldwide who had killed themselves after falling victim to sextortion since 2021.
It is not, however, the first time the FBI has expressed concern over this heinous crime that threatens the future of all countries, which are children.
A growing threat to minors
In a report in January of 2024, the FBI alerted that sextortion was a growing threat targeting minors. “Offenders deceive and manipulate children to create sexually explicit material for extortion purposes,” the FBI said.
Financially motivated sextortion is a criminal act that involves an offender coercing a minor to create and send sexually explicit material, the FBI explained.
The agency said offenders threaten to release that compromising material unless they receive payment, which is often requested in gift cards, mobile payment services, wire transfers, or cryptocurrency.
Financial gain, not neccessarily sexual gratification
“These offenders are motivated by financial gain, not necessarily just sexual gratification,” the FBI noted.”Victims are typically males between the ages of 14 and 17, but any child can become a victim.”
These crimes can lead victims to self-harm and have led to suicide. From October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations received over 13,000 reports of online financial sextortion of minors. The sextortion involved at least 12,600 victims—primarily boys—and led to at least 20 suicides.
In March of this year, the FBI revealed it had more than 250 investigations currently underway into sextortion.
