The rise of sextortion and responses to a growing crime

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection conducted research analysis on more than 6,500 firsthand open-source accounts that sextortion victims shared publicly about their experience of being financially sexually extorted. There has been a global increase in sextortion reports: in 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline received 26,718 reports, a jump from 10,731 reports in 2022 and up from 139 reports in 2021. The increase in reports is of growing concern to law enforcement, with speakers from Meta and NCMEC explaining why the rise of sextortion is a concern and what is being done across different countries and sectors to tackle the threat. Recommendations include more consistent reporting and data capture, more research to understand perpetrators and victims, and consultation with children and young people to better understand how they engage online and uncover opportunities for prevention.

Sextortion thrives on the lag between coercion and discovery, during which the offender escalates demands and the child remains isolated. Guardii's anti-sextortion detection module identifies the hallmark patterns of financial and sexually motivated sextortion in real time as the conversation unfolds, flagging sustained coercion, threats to distribute intimate images, and escalating demands for money or additional material. The system surfaces a child in crisis to a parent or school the moment the threat trajectory becomes clear, enabling intervention before compliance, before payment, and before the psychological harm compounds. Backed by Startmate and deployed across platforms including Instagram, Snapchat and Discord, the module translates the documented surge in sextortion reports into an operational early-warning capability that closes the window offenders depend on.