FBI advarede forældre om børnesortering. ved 2025 ncmec var logning 137 finansielle sager om dagen
The FBI has been warning parents about child sextortion since before this article first ran. The crime did not shrink. It changed shape, scaled up, and started killing teenage boys.
Sextortion, as Brian Herrick of the FBI’s Criminal Division defined it for ABC News, is an adult coercing a minor to produce a sexually explicit image and send it. Then the blackmail starts. Mark Barnwell, a Texas man, used female-presenting Facebook accounts to offer girls “modeling” work at $500 to $5,000 a shoot — if they sent sexual photos. After the first image he threatened to post it unless they sent more. He had 43 victims. A federal judge sentenced him to 35 years. Herrick’s team kept finding the same pattern on seized computers: not one victim, not ten, but 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 are not a type. Herrick listed doctors, lawyers, police, coaches, teachers — men from 18 to grandfather age. Gaming platforms are as useful to them as social media. A 14-year-old boy chasing cheat codes or in-app armor is an opening. The Violent Crimes Against Children International Task Force, with dozens of officers from dozens of countries, exists because the victims and the predators are rarely in the same zip code.
That was the 2019 warning. The explosion since then is financial sextortion. The FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children describe offenders who pose as peers, coax one explicit image, then demand gift cards, cash-app transfers, or crypto within hours. The targets flipped. Barnwell’s victims were mostly girls. The money schemes overwhelmingly hit boys 14 to 17, often from crews in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire.
NCMEC logged 10,731 financial-sextortion reports in 2022 and 26,718 in 2023. In 2025 it received more than 50,000 — about 137 a day, a 37 percent jump from 2024. NCMEC says it knows of at least 36 teenage boys who have died by suicide since 2021 after being targeted.
The child is the victim. Paying almost never stops the threats. Stop contact, save the evidence, report it. Local FBI field office, 1-800-CALL-FBI, or tips.fbi.gov. NCMEC: 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678) or the CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org. Teens who need images of themselves stripped from the internet can use NCMEC’s free Tag det ned tool. The single best defense is still the one Herrick pushed: a judgment-free conversation with your kid before a predator ever reaches them.
Relateret rapportering fra organisationen alliance: Welcome to Video dark-web bust, Gemmer sig i almindeligt sigte, og Kriminalitet Nyheder.
Featured Image Credit: CC / InkMedia.eu
If you or a young person you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the U.S. for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
