“I’ll Release Your Nudes”: Sextortion Victims Are Not Who You Think

Picture this scenario: you’re a 19-year-old guy on a social media app. An attractive woman slides into your DMs and immediately starts flirting with you.

After a little while they request a nude picture of yourself. You hesitate but they send a nude that matches their profile picture. You are caught in the moment and so, you send one.

This is the beginning of the most common scenario of sexual extortion or sextortion. The attractive woman is a scammer who threatens to send the victim’s nude photos on to their family, friends and workplace unless they pay them money.

In today’s Briefing, you may be surprised to hear that men aged 18-24 are the prime targets for these types of scams. Our guest on the show, Michelle (her first name only), an investigator with the office of the eSafety Commissioner, explains to Jan Fran why this is the case, along with her tips on how best to avoid such scams.

When we’re talking about these demands for payment, I think that the criminals behind these scams are really kind of focusing in particularly on male targets.

So more than eighty per cent of the reports of sextortion that we’ve received were from men, and almost seventy per cent of those are young men aged eighteen to twenty four years of age.

Michelle, Investigator at eSafety Commissioner Office.

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