Sextortion is a demand for money under threat of publishing intimate images or messages. In a large share of cases the sender has nothing and is bluffing at scale, quoting a leaked password to sound credible. Paying does not end it. The FBI received more than 75,000 sextortion reports in 2025.
Sextortion is a demand for money backed by the threat of publishing intimate images or messages. Two quite different crimes share the name, and telling them apart matters because the response differs.
The bluff, sent at volume. An email arrives quoting a password you once used, claiming that your webcam was accessed and that a recording exists. There is a payment address and a deadline. In the overwhelming majority of these, nothing exists. The password came from a historic data breach, the email went to hundreds of thousands of people, and the economics work if a tiny fraction pay.
The targeted version. Someone establishes contact, often on Instagram, Snapchat or a game, sometimes over weeks. Images are exchanged. The demand follows immediately, usually with a screenshot of the victim’s follower list attached. This form is aimed heavily at teenage boys and young men, and it moves very fast — sometimes from first message to demand within a single evening.
A third form is growing: content stolen rather than given. The FBI warned in August 2026 that sexual exploitation actors are breaking into social media accounts to take explicit content and sell it, frequently before the victim knows anything has happened.
The volume is enormous and the average loss is small. IC3 received more than 75,000 sextortion submissions in 2025, and the wider extortion category ran to 89,129 complaints with an average reported loss of about $1,374 — against $20,699 across all IC3 complaints.
If this is happening to you right now
Stop replying. Do not pay. Screenshot everything, including the account and any payment address. Then tell one person — a friend, a parent, anyone. This is a crime committed against you and it is extraordinarily common. If you are under 18, or the images are of someone under 18, contact law enforcement immediately: that is not a scam, it is child exploitation, and it is treated as such.
Either a friendly approach on a social platform or game, or a mass email quoting a password from an old breach. The two versions look nothing alike and are both sextortion.
Images exchanged during a conversation, content stolen from a broken-into account, or, most often in the email version, no material whatsoever.
Pay within hours or it goes to your contacts. A list of your followers or family members is often attached to show that the audience has been identified.
Where it could have stopped
Paying does not end it. Every reported loss in this category is somebody who paid and was contacted again. The demand’s power comes from being a secret, and it collapses the moment one other person knows.
Replying, negotiating or paying all confirm a live target. Demands increase, and deadlines shorten. The people who lose the most are the ones who tried to manage it alone.
Most senders have nothing and move on. Volume rather than follow-through is the business model, and the falling loss figures alongside rising complaint counts suggest more people are now recognising that.
Platforms remove non-consensual intimate imagery. Fingerprinting services can block an image from being uploaded without anyone having to see or store it. Both work better before publication than after.
Shame is the mechanism. Not fear of the images so much as fear of the conversation that follows them. The scheme’s entire power is the victim’s certainty that nobody can be told, and every part of the message is built to reinforce that.
The deadline prevents the pause. Hours, not days. The window is deliberately shorter than the time it takes to calm down enough to think, or to work out who to ask.
A quoted password feels like proof. It is the only piece of real information in a mass email, and it does an enormous amount of work — most people do not know how widely breached credentials circulate.
Young people are targeted where secrecy is easiest. The financially motivated variant aimed at teenagers works because a fourteen-year-old cannot imagine telling a parent. That is the design, not a side effect.
And older victims are inside something longer. The 60-plus group files a quarter of the reports of the 20-29 group and loses more than twice as much, because their version usually arrives inside a relationship rather than as a cold demand.
Financially motivated sextortion aimed at English-speaking teenagers has been documented running substantially from West Africa, particularly Nigerian and Ivorian networks, operating at high volume through scripted approaches on Instagram and Snapchat. Law enforcement in several countries has described organised groups sharing scripts and target lists.
The mass-email bluff has no single geography. It requires nothing but a breached credential dump and a cryptocurrency address, and it is sent from anywhere.
The account-intrusion variant described in the FBI’s 2026 advisory is a different business again — closer to organised credential theft, with stolen content sold into criminal marketplaces rather than used to extort the person it came from.
What all three share is that the operator is rarely where the victim is, and rarely reachable. That is why the practical response on this page is about limiting harm and getting support, not about identifying anyone.
In August 2026 the FBI warned that sexual exploitation actors are illegally accessing victims' social media and personal accounts to steal explicit content and sell it on criminal marketplaces — often without the victim ever knowing. The intrusion methods are ordinary account-takeover techniques, including one that turns on persuading the victim to hand over a verification code.
FBI extortion complaints rose from 48,223 in 2023 to 89,129 in 2025 — an 85% increase — while reported losses went from $74.8 million to $122.5 million and then fell back in the most recent year. The pattern is consistent with a very high-volume, low-value crime: enormous numbers of approaches, most of which extract nothing.
The FBI received more than 75,000 sextortion submissions in 2025 and referred over 5,700 involving minors to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Its age breakdown shows the pattern most coverage misses: people in their twenties file by far the most reports, while people aged 60 and over lose more than twice as much money as any other group.
Right now, in order.
If you are under 18, or the images are of someone under 18. Contact law enforcement immediately. This is child exploitation and is treated as a serious crime with dedicated units. You are not in trouble. In the United States, NCMEC’s Take It Down service can prevent images of minors being posted or reposted, working from a digital fingerprint so that nobody has to see or store the image itself.
If you are an adult with images at risk. StopNCII works the same way for adults, creating a hash that participating platforms use to block uploads. Both services are free, and neither requires you to send anyone the image.
If you are a parent. The most useful thing you can do is in advance, and it is one sentence: if anything like this ever happens, you can tell me and you will not be in trouble. Teenagers do not conceal this because they do not trust their parents; they conceal it because they believe the consequence of telling is worse than the threat. Removing that belief is the whole intervention.
What not to do. Do not pay. Do not negotiate. Do not delete the evidence before recording it. Do not try to identify the person yourself. And do not pay anyone who later offers to remove the images for a fee.
Payments are almost always demanded in cryptocurrency or gift cards, and the sums are small enough to sit below any threshold that would attract a bank’s attention. In the mass-email version, a single address may receive payments from many victims, which is occasionally how clusters get traced.
The economics are worth understanding, because they explain why the crime persists at this volume. A mass sextortion email costs essentially nothing to send. If one recipient in ten thousand pays a few hundred dollars, it is profitable. Nothing about it requires skill, infrastructure, or any material relating to the recipient — which is why quoting an old breached password is such an efficient substitute for actually having something.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains how extortion payments are moved — and why many small cryptocurrency payments into one address are among the easier patterns for investigators to cluster.
No agency publishes a line item for most of the schemes on this site, so these charts show the official categories that contain this scheme. Each series is labelled with the agency's own category name. See how the mapping works.
Almost always no. Old passwords circulate in bulk from historic data breaches, and quoting one is the standard way to make a mass email feel personal. Change that password everywhere you have used it and turn on two-factor authentication — but the password appearing in an email is not evidence that anyone has anything of yours.
No. Paying identifies you as someone who pays and reliably produces further demands. Every reported loss in this category is somebody who paid and was contacted again. If you have paid, stop — you have not made things worse by having paid once, and continuing is what causes the real harm.
It changes what help you need, not the answer about paying. Stop responding, keep everything, and get takedown support: platforms act quickly on non-consensual intimate images, and there are services that can prevent publication rather than only respond to it. If the person in the images is under 18, contact law enforcement immediately — this is child exploitation, not a scam.
Tell an adult you trust today, even though it feels impossible. You are not in trouble and you have not done anything that makes this your fault. Stop replying, do not pay, screenshot everything, and report it. This happens to very large numbers of people your age — more than 5,700 reports involving minors were referred to NCMEC in one year in the US alone — and there are people whose job is exactly this.
Often, yes. Services exist that create a digital fingerprint of an image so platforms can block it without anyone having to see or store the image itself — NCMEC's Take It Down for people under 18, and StopNCII for adults. Platforms also remove non-consensual intimate imagery on request.
Because they are usually experiencing a different crime. Younger victims typically face a fast, high-volume demand for a few hundred dollars. Older victims are more often inside a longer manipulation, sometimes attached to a relationship built over weeks, where demands are larger and repeated.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.