Sextortion cases doubling: how predators target boys online

According to Independent Digital News and Media, reports of sextortion are on track to more than double this year. The Internet Watch Foundation recorded 462 cases through its Report Remove service by the end of June 2026, already above the 394 cases for the whole of 2025, which itself had grown from 151 in 2024.

Sextortion follows a fixed sequence. A predator persuades a young person to share an indecent image of themselves. Once the image exists, the predator uses it to blackmail them, threatening to send it to family, friends or school contacts unless the young person pays or sends more images. The scam depends entirely on that first image changing hands. Everything after it, the threats, the demands, the shame that keeps a child silent, follows from one moment of persuasion.

Boys make up 95 per cent of those involved in the cases reported this year. That is the detail that separates this from how sextortion is usually imagined. It is not girls being targeted in the way older safety campaigns assumed. It is boys, overwhelmingly, which suggests the approach that works on them is different from the one that gets discussed in most school assemblies and parental warnings.

Kerry Smith, chief executive of the IWF, said the figures show ‘a consistently worsening picture’ and that the numbers are ‘only the tip of the iceberg’, since many young people never report what has happened to them. That silence is itself part of how the scam holds. A predator does not need every target to stay quiet. They need enough of them to, while they move on to the next one. Smith described criminals ‘casting their nets wide, trying to lure thousands of children into harmful, potentially lethal, traps’.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said last month that the government would legislate to force nudity-blocking technology onto under-18s' devices if tech companies do not introduce it voluntarily. Rani Govender, head of child safety online at the NSPCC, said platforms already have the resources to make that change and that delay means more children will be harmed.

The mechanism works because the image, once sent, cannot be taken back. That is the single point where the whole scheme becomes possible. Before that image exists, a predator has nothing to hold over a young person. After it exists, they have something to hold over everything that follows.

Young people in the UK who have had a nude or sexual image shared, or fear it might be, can report it through Report Remove, run jointly by the IWF and the NSPCC, so the image can be found and removed from the internet.