Australian federal police are partnering with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to encourage young people to report online sextortion amid an explosion in the number of people falling victim to the practice.
Sextortion occurs when someone, commonly a young man, receives an unsolicited friend request on a social media platform. That account entices the user to share sexual images or videos, then blackmails them by threatening to publish the photos or send them to friends or family.
According to the eSafety commissioner, people are most often targeted on Snapchat and Instagram. The regulator reported more than 9,000 instances of image-based abuse in the last financial year – a 117% increase on the previous year. eSafety said 68% of those related to sextortion.
The majority of those targeted were aged between 18 and 24, according to eSafety, but there has been an increase in reports from children.
The AFP’s Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation reported a 60% increase in sextortion reports in December 2022, and expect another spike this December. ACCCE receives about 300 reports from people under 18 each month, though it is estimated only one in 10 report it.
To combat the rise, ACCCE has partnered with Meta and the Kids Helpline with educational videos and quizzes to encourage reporting.
Frank Rayner, the AFP’s acting commander ACCCE and human exploitation, told Guardian Australia that most people extorting young people on social media were not known to that person, and were frequently based outside Australia.
“We’ll generally have enough information to attribute where these offenders are operating from and we’re basically referring to online syndicates of offenders from Africa,” he said. “Nigeria is the main source of this type of offending that we have noticed.”
He said young people were reluctant to report to ACCCE because they feared getting in trouble from their parents or felt embarrassed.
“[We’re] saying to both young people and also their parents or guardians that this is prevalent not just in Australia but around the world,” he said.
“And kids are caught up in it really quickly. It’s not uncommon for it to be a time period of only 20 to 30 minutes between the first contact, images being sent and then demands being made.”
He said children needed to know they could come forward and they had not committed a crime.
Mia Garlick, Meta’s regional policy director, said for some young people it would be the first time something like this had happened to them, and the aim was to remove the stigma.
Meta has processes in place that allows people to create an unidentifiable hash of images so they can be detected and prevented from being posted online or sent via messages. The company also works to block accounts targeting young people.
“Prevention is the best cure … We do try to increase our use of behavioural signals [to identify accounts] that have been blocked by a number of people,” Garlick said.
• In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
