Record number of UK under 18s facing 'sextortion' online as experts say no time to lose on nudity blockers for teens' phones
Guardii Analysis
The Internet Watch Foundation reported that the UK Report Remove helpline received 462 confirmed sextortion reports involving child sexual abuse imagery by the end of June 2026, exceeding the total for all of 2025 by 17 percent. Boys accounted for 95 percent of victims, with criminals using coercion and threats to extort money or compliance after persuading young people to create nude or sexual imagery of themselves on camera-enabled devices.
Sextortion at this scale demands detection architecture capable of identifying coercion and escalation as it unfolds. The anti-sextortion module in Guardii, a world-leading AI online-safety platform and Meta Business Partner, monitors direct-message conversations across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms for the characteristic pattern of requests escalating into threats, blocking hostile contact before imagery is created and flagging the child in acute distress to a parent or school authority without creating a surveillance feed of message content. Real-time interception of the coercion sequence offers the structural answer to a threat that has already surpassed every previous annual total halfway through the year.