A Modeling Pitch Used to Open Child Sextortion. Financial Crews Now Pull Teen Boys Into Encrypted Chats and Demand Payment

WASHINGTON — The warning that first ran here, on June 4, 2019, was about a slow con. An adult built a fake profile, offered a child “modeling” money, and then used the first picture as a leash. That crime did not retire. It got faster, it changed who it hunted, and it learned to leave the public internet before a parent, a platform, or a detective could see the conversation.

Brian Herrick, then with the FBI’s Criminal Division, defined the older version for ABC News in the plainest terms: an adult coerces a minor to produce a sexually explicit image and send it. The blackmail starts after that first file exists. Mark Barnwell, a Texas man, ran the script through female-presenting Facebook accounts. The opener, preserved in his case, was the kind of line that still circulates in screenshots: a shoot paying $500 to $5,000, if the girl would send sexual photos. After the first image he threatened to post it unless more arrived. He had 43 victims. A federal judge sentenced him to 35 years. Herrick’s team kept finding the same pattern on seized computers, and the victim counts were not one, or ten. They were 100, 200, 500.

“This starts the cycle of victimization that is very hard to break out of because now, it’s not one picture. It’s several pictures, it’s videos,” Herrick said.

The offenders were never a single type. Herrick listed doctors, lawyers, police, coaches, and teachers, men from 18 into grandfather age. A gaming platform was as useful as a social network. A 14-year-old chasing cheat codes or in-app armor was an opening. The FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children International Task Force exists because the child and the adult are rarely in the same zip code, let alone the same country. That was the 2019 problem. It is still a problem. It is no longer the only one.

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The shape that has consumed the case numbers since then is financial sextortion. The FBI’s own description is specific. Someone poses as a peer, coaxes one explicit image or video, and then demands money within hours, sometimes within minutes, on threat of sending the file to family, classmates, or a whole contact list. The targets flipped. Barnwell’s known victims were mostly girls. The money schemes overwhelmingly hit boys 14 to 17. The crews the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations have described are often outside the United States, frequently in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, sometimes in the Philippines. They are not collecting a private library. They are running a payment business.

On September 8, 2025, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network told banks to treat that business as a financial-crime typology, not a private embarrassment. FinCEN Director Andrea Gacki said the schemes “can target anyone and often seek to exploit victims’ feelings of helplessness and embarrassment for financial gain.” The notice told institutions what the case files already showed: offenders research a child on social media, open contact on a game or a public app, move the chat to private messaging or video, solicit an image, and then pivot to Cash App, Zelle, gift cards, or crypto. Since April 2023, the FBI has also logged an uptick in a nastier shortcut. When a child refuses to send anything, offenders build fake or manipulated sexual images from ordinary photos already on the child’s accounts, or from a video call, and extort with those.

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The two big numbers that get quoted in the same breath are not the same number, and mixing them hides the crime. FinCEN, citing the FBI, said that in 2024 the Bureau received nearly 55,000 reports of crimes related to sextortion and extortion, with losses of $33.5 million, a 59 percent increase over 2023. That bucket includes adults. The count that is specifically about children and financially motivated sextortion comes from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. On June 25, 2026, NCMEC published its 2025 tally: more than 50,000 reports, about 137 a day, up from more than 36,000 in 2024. NCMEC’s own earlier public counts put the same category at 10,731 reports in 2022 and 26,718 in 2023. The curve is not a blip.

When NCMEC can see who filed a public report, the child is usually the one who asked for help. Where the relationship to the victim was known, 94 percent of those public sextortion reports came from the child or a parent, and most of them came from the children themselves. That fact cuts against the old lecture that kids will never tell. It also explains why the next tactical shift matters. NCMEC said offenders are moving conversations onto encrypted apps faster, which makes it harder to connect related cases. Some of those platforms report little or nothing to the CyberTipline. A crime that depends on shame is now also hiding in software designed not to keep a record.

https://twitter.com/NCMEC/status/2105039970649931962

State squads are already living inside that gap. On June 29, 2026, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said its four Internet Crimes Against Children agents were collectively trying to identify more than 150 child victims of sextortion, and that those were only the Tennessee cases on their desks. Assistant Special Agent in Charge Robert Burghardt told reporters the national figures did not surprise him. “This leaves the child carrying an overwhelming emotional burden on their own,” he said. He also said education is the strongest defense, and that parents need the conversation before a crisis, not during one. The FBI and NCMEC have linked these schemes to the deaths of teenage boys. NCMEC has said it knows of at least three dozen such deaths in the United States since 2021. The child is the victim of a crime. The person demanding the money is the offender.

Paying almost never ends it. A July 2026 review of 5,000 victim accounts posted to a public forum, mostly adults, found that 26 percent paid and that 55 percent of those who paid were threatened again. Sensitive files were actually leaked in 1.6 percent of those accounts. The leverage is the threat, not the follow-through, which is exactly why a terrified 15-year-old will drain a parent’s Cash App balance at 1 a.m. The FBI’s page on the crime lists what a federal case looks like when the money trail is followed instead. In September 2024, two brothers from Lagos, Nigeria, were sentenced to 210 months in U.S. federal prison after a scheme that sexually exploited more than 100 victims, including at least 11 identified minors. They had bought hacked social-media accounts, posed as young women, and built collages to terrorize targets. The same FBI summary describes a 2024 indictment of four men and a woman from Delaware, accused of an international sextortion and money-laundering scheme that pulled in millions, including $1.9 million through Cash App and Apple Pay alone. Ivorian authorities arrested another alleged co-conspirator in Abidjan in February 2024.

None of that helps a family at the moment the message arrives. The sequence investigators repeat is short. Stop contact. Do not pay. Do not delete the thread, the profile, or the payment record. Screenshot the account name, the URL, the wallet address, and the demand. Report it to the local FBI field office, to 1-800-CALL-FBI, or at tips.fbi.gov. NCMEC takes reports at 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678) and through the CyberTipline. A child whose own images are already online can use NCMEC’s free Take It Down tool to generate a hash that participating platforms use to strip copies. Herrick’s oldest advice is still the one that beats a perfectly worded app setting: a judgment-free conversation before a stranger ever gets there.

The modeling line Barnwell used is still out there. So is the new one, the classmate who will not stay on the app where a parent can see the chat. The AEGIS Alliance has tracked the same underground economy from other doors, including the Welcome to Video marketplace, the files described in Hiding In Plain Sight, and the arrests in Georgia’s Operation Broken Arrow. More of that reporting sits in Crime News and U.S. News.

Featured Image Credit: CC / InkMedia.eu

If you or a young person you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the United States for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In the United Kingdom, the Samaritans are free on 116 123.