New Federal Law Drives Over 1,000% Surge in Reports of Online Child Enticement and Sex Trafficking

The REPORT Act, bipartisan federal legislation enacted in May 2024, expanded mandatory reporting requirements for online platforms to include child sex trafficking and online enticement alongside existing child sexual abuse material obligations. In the first year of enforcement, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children recorded an over 1,000 percent increase in reports of these newly mandated categories, with more than 53,000 urgent cases involving children in imminent danger escalated to law enforcement in 2025 alone. The law also extends evidence preservation timelines and increases penalties for platforms that knowingly fail to report abuse on their systems.

When platforms are required to report but lack the capacity to intervene at the point of contact, children remain exposed throughout the grooming sequence until an offender uploads material or a parent discovers the exchange. Guardii operates at a different layer: its anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection modules analyse conversational patterns in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other messaging environments, identifying escalation, coercion and sustained targeting as they unfold and blocking hostile contact before it reaches the child or surfaces a crisis to a parent or authority while a harmful interaction is still developing, rather than after material has been created or distributed.