‘It looks so real’: amid rise in financial sextortion, Childline is helping teenagers fight back | Internet safety

It was a phone call that has become all too common for Childline counsellors in recent months.

The 17-year-old boy said he was scared and did not know what to do. He had been contacted by a “girl” on social media claiming to be his own age and, after an exchange of messages, had sent her an intimate image. And then the blackmail demands started.

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

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

Hipkiss says the teenagers who contact Childline are embarrassed about being tricked and concerned that friends and family, who might be listed on the teenager’s social media profile, will be sent the images they are being blackmailed over.

“What we’re concerned with is the emotional impact it has had on them,” says Hipkiss, who works at Childline’s London base. “They feel extremely foolish, they feel very embarrassed. They are concerned that family and friends will find out.” She adds: “Sometimes they’ve paid money, sometimes they haven’t.”

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

The Report Remove service creates a hash, or digital “fingerprint”, of any image uploaded to it. This fingerprint is then circulated among major platforms including Facebook, Instagram, X, Google and Snapchat with the aim of blocking that image from being uploaded to those services, or taking it down if it has been published, as well as preventing it from being uploaded again in the future. Report Remove is operated in tandem with the Internet Watch Foundation child safety watchdog.

Gawain Griffiths, a website supervisor at Childline, says children who contact the service about sextortion incidents are told about the Report Remove platform as part of a package of support. “Report Remove is a really useful tool for young people because it helps them to put them back in control of their images, where somebody is trying to take that control away,” he says.

Griffiths says over the past six months, as sophisticated artificial intelligence image generating tools have become more widely available, Childline has been receiving more calls from teenagers who have been sent, without prior contact, faked indecent images of themselves and are threatened with blackmail over their publication.

“It’s an attack where someone has sent an AI generated image or a fake image and they have said if you don’t send me money or don’t send me another nude, I will then share this 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 of her that used her face and bedroom, having been apparently taken from their Instagram account. Childline said the “nude” images were typically made of the victim’s face transposed on to someone else’s body. In another apparent AI case, a 14-year-old boy sent some pictures of his face to a girl he had met online and they were used to make a deepfake pornography video.

“This person has used some sort of deepfake AI thing to make a porn video with my face on it. Now they’re demanding money from me, and they said if I don’t pay my life will be 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 initial contact turns threatening as soon as the victim is tricked into sending an image. “Once that image or video is shared then it’s a very quick turnaround,” he says. In financial sextortion, it becomes a “very cold, almost businesslike approach” of “you need to give me this money or I will send this to people you know”, while indicating that they know how to contact their parents or friends.

One sextortion victim, a boy aged 16, told a Childline counsellor they feared they would have to move schools if intimate pictures were published. “I met someone online and sent them a nude photo,” said the teenager in quotes that have been anonymised by Childline. “I’m now being blackmailed for money – they say they’re going to share the photo if I don’t send them money. I don’t know who they are in real life. I’m so worried about my friends and family finding out and judging me. I feel like I would need to move schools if any of my friends found out about the picture.”

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

An 18-year-old boy said he was contacted by a girl on the gamer-focused chat app Discord and struck up a conversation about gaming – “I can’t lie, it felt nice having things in common” – which turned nasty once he had sent some nudes. “Eventually, I got a call from a number I thought belonged to the girl but instead it was a man with a foreign accent. By that point it was too late – they already had my nudes,” he said.

Other victims have told Childline they have been contacted on Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz, and in some cases are asked to move to a private messaging app where communications become increasingly sexualised before they are asked to send intimate photos or videos. In one case heard by Childline, a 16-year-old boy was sent semi-nudes on a private messaging platform and was then told it was his turn to return the favour. He sent two nudes and was then immediately asked for £100 or else the images would be sent to his followers.

In other cases heard by Childline, teenagers have sent money to a sextortion fraudster only for them to come back for more, with figures mentioned to helplines ranging from £20 to £3,000. Childline advises victims, as per National Crime Agency advice, not to pay the fraudster and to block them on social media, although they should avoid deleting anything that can be used as evidence.

Griffiths says his advice to teenagers is not to avoid online interaction entirely but to understand and set their own limits. “It’s about understanding your boundaries,” he says. “It’s about understanding that if you’re talking to somebody and they’re asking you to do something, to take a moment and think about that.”