Harms include threats to release intimate pictures as charity warns against parents sharing photos or details of children online
Nearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life.
The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject.
The National Crime Agency has said that it is receiving more than 110 reports a month of child sextortion attempts, where criminal gangs trick teenagers into sending intimate pictures of themselves and then blackmail them.
Agencies across the UK, US and Australia have confirmed a rising number of sextortion cases involving teenage boys and young adult males being targeted by cyber-criminal gangs based in west Africa or south-east Asia, some of which have ended in tragedy. Murray Dowey, a 16-year-old from Dunblane, Scotland, killed himself in 2023 after becoming a victim of sextortion on Instagram and Dinal De Alwis, 16, killed himself in Sutton, south London, in October 2022 after being blackmailed over nude photographs.
