Lawmakers push bill to criminalize sextortion

Senator Ashley Moody and Representative Laurel Lee have introduced the Combating Online Predators Act in Congress to explicitly criminalize intentional threats to distribute child sexual abuse material, directly targeting sextortion as a federal offense. The legislation responds to FBI data showing nearly 55,000 reports of sextortion and extortion crimes in 2024, a 59 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The bill has passed unanimously in the House and both lawmakers are now pushing for Senate passage, driven by the fact that numerous teens have taken their own lives after being targeted by perpetrators who trick them into providing compromising images and then threaten public exposure.

When criminalization establishes the legal framework for prosecution after harm has occurred, real-time interception prevents the threat from reaching the victim in the first instance. Guardii's anti-sextortion detection module operates at the front edge of the offense, identifying coercion, escalation and threats to distribute material as the conversation unfolds across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms. By flagging the extortive demand before a child complies or a parent learns of the threat, Guardii surfaces the child in acute distress to a safeguarding professional and captures the behavioral and technical evidence prosecutors require under statutes like the Combating Online Predators Act, enabling both immediate intervention to prevent self-harm and rapid escalation to law enforcement with the structured intelligence needed to support federal charges. The combination of clear criminal sanction and point-of-contact prevention creates a continuum from detection to prosecution that neither measure achieves alone.