Snapchat rolls out new safety features to combat sextortion targeting teens

Snapchat announced enhanced in-app warnings and blocking mechanisms designed to disrupt sextortion attempts, including pop-up alerts when a user receives a friend request from an account exhibiting suspicious behavior such as rapid-fire friend requests to multiple young users, and expanded blocking that prevents a user from creating new accounts to continue contacting someone who has blocked them. The company reported that financially motivated sextortion targeting teenagers has become a priority threat, with criminals often posing as peers to solicit explicit images and then demanding payment under threat of distribution, and stated that the new features aim to interrupt the initial contact phase of such schemes.

In-app warnings and blocking delay or deter an offender's ability to make first contact but do not evaluate the conversation once a connection is made, nor do they detect coercion and escalation within an existing thread where trust has already been established or manipulated. Guardii's real-time sextortion detection operates inside Snapchat direct messages and across Instagram, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, analyzing the linguistic and behavioral markers of financial or sexual extortion—including solicitation, threats of exposure and demands for images or payment—and surfacing the conversation to a parent, school or law enforcement before the child complies or the harm is consummated. The platform, backed by Startmate, detects the threat pattern rather than relying on the child to recognize and report it.