Increase in sextortion cases causes FBI to issue major warning

The problem with sextortion is getting so bad that the FBI has issued a major warning.

Sextortion is a form of exploitation where victims, including children and teens, are coerced into sharing explicit photos or videos of themselves. The predator will use the images to blackmail the target with threats to publicly expose the material.

“Sextortion is something that we’ve seen blow up and double and triple in the last couple of years,” said Lt. Wade Williams with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office.

As a parent, how do you even begin to protect your child when they have their phone in their hand at all times?

Parent Michelle Wetmore said she has seen fake accounts and strangers trying to talk to her, but Wetmore ensures her daughter isn’t a victim to one of these people.

“She’s 16, so — the plus side of 16– there is an app that I can monitor her driving because she just started driving,” she said, “so I know exactly where she is. All the time, it alerts you for accidents, like that is a good side of it, but the flip side of being 16 is she’s a young, attractive 16-year-old girl who, you know, I mean, again, all these different apps and predators and fake people, fake accounts.”

Predators demand nude photos or videos from children and teens through apps right in front of us, like TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.

Williams leads the task force for hunting down predators at the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. The problem of sextortion, he said, is happening right inside our homes.

“So, they’ll say, ‘You’re going to get exposed‘– is the word they use– ‘if you don’t do what I tell you,'” Williams said.

If you think this really couldn’t happen to your child, look at the case of 26-year-old Jorge Ingunza from Naples. He hacked Snapchat accounts of teenagers, captured their nude photos from their Snapchat My Eyes Only section, and then extorted them to send more.

“In the case of Jorge Inhunza, which is one of the most prolific sextortion [cases] that we’ve ever experienced, what he was doing was several different things. He would try to Romeo approach where he would pretend to be a boy or girl and try to solicit children for nude images and videos or inappropriate files of them,” Williams said.

Williams said that in Ingunza’s case, police were able to identify only 12 victims successfully, but he feels there were many more. He said police weren’t able to identify more due to various technical reasons.

Only two of Ingunza’s victims self-reported to authorities. He was sentenced to 29 years in prison.

The FBI said over the past year, law enforcement agencies have received over 7,000 reports of online sextortion of minors, resulting in over 3,000 victims who were mostly boys. The FBI said more than a dozen died by suicide.

Titiana Jordan is the chief parenting officer at Bark Technologies. Bark is just one of the apps available that allows you to closely monitor your child’s phone.

“Last year, we analyzed over four and a half billion data points across children’s text, email and social media, and the top five apps flagged for severe sexual content, which includes grooming and predation were Kik, Tumblr, Twitter, which is now X, Discord and Instagram,” Jordan said.

Jordan stresses that having an open conversation with your children about the dangers of predators can save their lives.

“These predators can explain to them how to cover their tracks, how to delete messages before you even see them, how to utilize apps that look like other apps that are benign, like a calculator app, for example, to hide messages and photos and videos that they don’t want to see,” Jordan said.

If your child sends a nude image of themselves and is scared that it’s online somewhere, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has an online tool to try and get that photo removed.

It’s important to take the phone away from your child and not return it, because they are likely to delete evidence out of embarrassment or fear of parental judgement.

Click here to learn more about the tool.

Here is a list of child monitoring applications that can help parents control what information is sent to their children:

• Google Safety Center
• How to install parental controls on Apple devices
• Bark.com
• Aura.com