'It looks so real': As financial sextortion rises, Childline helps teens fight back | Internet Safety

It was a phone call that Childline counsellors have received all too frequently in recent months.

The 17-year-old said he was scared and didn't know what to do. He was contacted on social media by a “girl” claiming to be his age and, after exchanging messages, sent her an intimate picture. And then the blackmail demands started.

This is financial sextortion, a worrying trend in internet fraud targeting British teenagers.

Rebekah Hipkiss, the head of Childline, who took the call, says the frequency of these contacts with victims of financial sextortion is daily and has increased “enormously” over the past 12 months. In the past year, Childline has identified more than 100 cases of financial sextortion, the first data the organization has collected since it assigned a specific code to such incidents.

According to Hipkiss, the teenagers who contact Childline are embarrassed at having been duped and fearful that the images used to blackmail them will be sent to friends and family who may be listed on the teenager's social media profile.

“What we worry about is the emotional impact it has on them,” says Hipkiss, who works at Childline's London office. “They feel extremely stupid, they are very embarrassed. They are afraid that family and friends will find out.” She adds: “Sometimes they have paid money, sometimes they haven't.”

Childline, part of the children's charity NSPCC, also runs a service that can remove indecent images of children – such as images of victims of sexual blackmail – from the internet if they have been posted online, and allows victims to report images or videos anonymously. It also aims to prevent them from being uploaded to platforms.

The Report Remove service creates a hash or digital “fingerprint” of each image uploaded. This fingerprint is then shared with major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X, Google and Snapchat to block the image from being uploaded to those services or to remove it if it has been published and to prevent it from being uploaded again in the future. Report Remove is operated in partnership with child protection organization Internet Watch Foundation.

Gawain Griffiths, website manager at Childline, says children who contact the service about sextortion incidents are informed about the Report Remove platform as part of a support package. “Report Remove is a really useful tool for young people because it helps them regain control of their images when someone is trying to take that control away from them,” he says.

Griffiths says that over the past six months, as sophisticated artificial intelligence-based image-generation tools have become more readily available, Childline has received an increase in calls from teenagers who have been sent fake, indecent images of themselves without prior contact and threatened with blackmail for publishing them.

“It's an attack where someone sent an artificial intelligence generated or fake image and said if you don't send me money or send me another nude photo, I'm going to share it with other people,” he said.

In one case heard by a Childline counsellor, a 15-year-old girl said a stranger had made a “really convincing” fake nude picture of her, showing her face and bedroom, which appeared to have been taken from her Instagram account. Childline said the “nude pictures” were typically made from the victim's face superimposed onto another person's body. In another apparent AI case, a 14-year-old boy sent some pictures of his face to a girl he met online and these were used to create a deepfake porn video.

“This person used some kind of deepfake AI to make a porn video with my face on it. Now they are demanding money from me and saying if I don't pay, my life is over. I know it's not me in the video, but it looks so real,” the boy told Childline.

In more typical cases, Griffiths says, the first contact becomes threatening once the victim is tricked into sending a picture. “Once the picture or video is shared, it moves very quickly,” he says. With financial sextortion, it becomes a “very cold, almost businesslike approach” along the lines of “you have to give me this money or I'll send it to people you know,” while implying that you know how to contact their parents or friends.

One sextortion victim, a 16-year-old boy, told a Childline counsellor he feared he would have to change schools if intimate images were made public. “I met someone online and sent them a naked photo,” the teenager said in quotes anonymised by Childline. “Now I'm being blackmailed for money – they say they will share the photo if I don't send them money. I don't know who they are in real life. I'm so scared my friends and family will find out and judge me. I feel like if any of my friends find out I'll have to change schools. about the picture.”

Another 16-year-old boy told Childline he was duped by a fake account with a profile picture of “some smiling girl.” “It never occurred to me at the time that the pictures could belong to someone else,” he said.

An 18-year-old boy said he was contacted by a girl on the gamer chat app Discord and started a conversation about gaming – “I can't lie, it was nice to have things in common” – but that turned naughty after he sent a few nude photos. “Eventually I got a call from a number I thought belonged to the girl, but instead it was a guy with a foreign accent. By that point it was too late – they already had my nude photos,” he said.

Other victims have told Childline they were contacted via Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz. In some cases, they were asked to move to a private messaging app where communication becomes increasingly sexualised before being asked to send intimate photos or videos. In one case brought to Childline's attention, a 16-year-old boy was sent semi-naked images via a private messaging platform and then told it was his turn to return the favour. He sent two nude images and was then immediately asked for £100 or the images would be sent to his followers.

In other cases Childline has heard of teenagers sending money to a sextortion scammer, only for them to demand more money. The amounts quoted to helplines ranged from £20 to £3,000. Childline, like the National Crime Agency, advises victims not to pay the scammer and to block them on social media, but they should avoid deleting anything that could be used as evidence.

Griffiths says his advice to teens is not to avoid online interactions altogether, but to understand and set their own boundaries. “It's about knowing your boundaries,” he says. “It's about understanding that when you're talking to someone and they ask you to do something, take a moment and think about it.”