Tech companies including Snapchat and Facebook reported more than 9,600 cases of adults grooming children online in the UK in just six months last year – the equivalent of about 400 a week.
Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), have grown increasingly alarmed about the growing threat from sextortion and other crimes targeting teenagers.
The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year received 546,000 reports from tech firms of adults across the world soliciting children – a 192% increase from 2023.
As many as 9,600 of these reports came from the UK in the first six months of 2024. Snapchat reported far more troubling material to NCMEC than any other platform in that period, its records show.
The children’s charity, NSPCC, described the figures as “shocking” and said they were likely an underestimate.
The NCA has launched what it called “unprecedented” campaigns in the UK to alert teachers, parents and children to the dangers of sextortion, in which victims are blackmailed into sharing abusive, explicit images.
The NCA said: “Sextortion is a heartless crime, which can have devastating consequences for victims. Sadly, teenagers in the UK and around the world have taken their own lives because of it.”
The NCMEC data is significant as it is based on reports from online platforms and internet providers – such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok – rather than victims, who can be reluctant to disclose the abuse.
Tech firms are obliged under US law to flag suspicious material to NCMEC. The figures show that Snapchat reported about 20,000 instances of concerning material – including sextortion and child sexual abuse images – in the first half of last year.
This is more than the combined number of reports from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), Google and Discord. It is understood that Snapchat revised its policies for reporting this content last year and that as a result, subsequent figures will be lower.
Rani Govender, of the NSPCC, said sextortion and other financially motivated sexual crimes had a “devastating” impact on youngsters, affecting their ability to trust or seek help and in some cases leading to suicide.
NCMEC said it was aware of “more than three dozen” teenage boys worldwide who had killed themselves after falling victim to sextortion since 2021.
Govender said some tech firms were “inadvertently turning a blind eye to the abuse occurring on their watch” by introducing protections such as end-to-end encryption, which make it harder to spot harmful content.
Unlike some other platforms, Snapchat does not have end-to-end encryption on its text-based chats.
Police forces are increasingly concerned that predators are turning to ever more sophisticated attempts to target children online.
The Guardian has uncovered a 101-page manual giving detailed instructions on how best to exploit young internet users, including advice on the best phones, encryption, apps and alter egos to use.
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The dossier teaches users how to turn victims into “modern-day slaves” by acquiring explicit images before they then feel “compelled to comply with the extortionist’s demands”.
The guide was allegedly produced by a 20-year-old man called Baron Martin from Arizona, US, who was arrested by the FBI in December and calls himself “the king of extortion”. Martin claims it has been “the catalyst for thousands of extortions”, according to the US Department of Justice.
According to researchers, the sextortion manual was distributed on a number of “Com networks” – online communities where mostly young men share sadistic and misogynistic material and encourage each other to commit crimes.
Milo Comerford, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) thinktank, said: “The continued accessibility of this kind of chillingly detailed sextortion guide points to the growing risk posed by toxic online communities that exploit and abuse children.”
The FBI has identified scores of online gangs who collaborate to identify vulnerable victims before targeting them using a feigned romantic interest to obtain compromising photos.
Those are then used to blackmail the victim to either provide further explicit images, self-harm, or carry out another act of violence or animal abuse.
Comerford, of the ISD, said “robust multi-agency” safeguards were urgently required to build awareness of the risks of sextortion among young people, parents, guardians, teachers and others.
He added: “These transnational networks are comprised of a constantly shifting landscape of groups that use social media platforms to identify, groom, and harm their victims, and in some cases engage in mass violence.”
Snapchat and Facebook have been approached for comment.
