What is sextortion, and what do I do if it happens to me or my child?

More context

Sextortion is a crime where someone obtains — or fabricates with AI — an intimate image of you, then threatens to share it with people who matter to you (family, friends, employer, school, social-media followers) unless you do something they demand. The demand is usually money, increasingly often in cryptocurrency or gift cards, sometimes more intimate images, occasionally an in-person meeting. It is one of the most damaging online crimes per victim and, in 2026, one of the fastest-growing.

It is not your fault. That sentence belongs at the top, in bold, regardless of how the image came to exist:

• If you sent an image to someone you trusted who later turned, the betrayal is theirs.
• If someone built a deepfake of you using public photos, you did nothing wrong by having photos online.
• If a hacker stole images from a device or a cloud account, the crime is theirs.

This matters because sextortion attackers depend entirely on shame and panic to keep their victims silent and to make them pay. Shame keeps you from telling a trusted person; panic keeps you from thinking clearly. Both can be broken in the first ten minutes if you know what to do.

The five steps, in order, if it happens:

1. Do not pay. Across every documented case sample — FBI, Europol, French Pharos, UK NCA — payment is followed by more demands within hours. The attacker has zero incentive to stop because the image still exists. Refusing to pay does not make things worse; paying does.
2. Do not delete the conversation. Take screenshots — every message, every threat, every account name, every URL. This is evidence. The platform and the police will need it.
3. Block and report on the platform. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram — all have specific reporting flows for sextortion (often labelled “threatens to share intimate content” or similar). Reports go to dedicated safety teams; in many cases the account is removed within hours.
4. Contact a dedicated helpline immediately. In France: 3018 (free, 9am-11pm, chat available on e-enfance.org) — handles both minors and adults. In the US: NCMEC’s Take It Down specifically removes intimate images of minors across all major platforms. UK: Internet Watch Foundation + NSPCC. EU-wide: Better Internet for Kids. These services move fast and they have direct channels to the platforms.
5. Tell someone you trust. Partner, parent, close friend, school counsellor, doctor. The shame the attacker is selling is the only leverage they have. Voicing the situation to one trusted person collapses most of it.

For parents of teens, the conversation matters more than any filter:

• “If anyone — friend, stranger, online crush — pressures you, threatens you, or demands money over an image, come to me first. There is no situation where I would be angry at you. The anger belongs to the person doing this. We will deal with it together.”
• “Adults asking minors to keep secrets from parents are wrong, every time. There is no online relationship that should require hiding the conversation from us.”

Several documented cases since 2023 have ended in teen suicide, especially among teenage boys in the US, UK, France and Australia. The pattern is repeatable: a stranger posing as a peer, an intimate photo within hours of the conversation starting, an immediate demand for $300-$1000 in cryptocurrency, threats to forward the image to followers and family. The attacker counts on the teen being too ashamed to tell anyone in time. The single best defence — long before any incident — is a child who knows, in advance, that this exists, that paying does not work, and that telling a parent is exactly the right thing to do.

Legal context (2026): non-consensual sharing of intimate images, sextortion, and deepfake intimate images are explicitly criminalised in most of the world. France’s SREN law (2024) covers deepfakes specifically; the EU AI Act adds transparency obligations; the UK Online Safety Act 2023 made sharing intimate images without consent a criminal offence; the US TAKE IT DOWN Act (signed 2025) requires platforms to remove intimate images of real persons (including deepfakes) within 48 hours of a valid request. The legal frame is on the victim’s side.

The shape of sextortion has not changed in twenty years; the channels, the AI-fabrication capability, and the industrialisation have. The defence has not changed either: do not pay, do not hide, ask for help fast, give nothing more.