There’s a message sitting in someone’s inbox right now that’s making their heart race. It might be from a stranger they chatted with online last week, or it could be a cold email claiming a hacker has footage of them visiting an adult website. Either way, it ends with the same demand pay up, or everyone you know finds out.
This is sextortion. And if you’ve never heard of it, or you’ve only heard of it happening to other people, the statistics might shock you. In the first months of 2025 alone, the risk of being targeted by sextortion scammers in the UK jumped by nearly 50% compared to the previous year. Across the whole of Merseyside, there were over 530 reports in just nine months. And those are only the cases people actually reported most victims stay silent out of shame, which is exactly what these criminals are counting on.
In this guide, we will talk you through How To Protect Yourself From Sextortion Scams. Whether you’re reading this because you’re worried it could happen to you, because it’s already happening, or because you want to protect someone you care about you’ll find everything you need here. We’ll cover what sextortion actually is, how these scams work in real life, how to spot the warning signs before it’s too late, and what to do if you find yourself on the receiving end of a threat.
What Is Sextortion, Really
The word is a mashup of “sex” and “extortion,” and it describes exactly what it sounds like: using sexual content real, fabricated, or threatened to extort money or compliance from someone.
But here’s what catches most people off guard. Sextortion isn’t just one thing. It comes in several different forms, and not all of them require you to have ever shared an intimate image in your life.
The webcam scam. This is the version most people think of. A stranger befriends someone online often on a dating app or social media and the conversation gradually turns intimate. At some point, the victim is persuaded to undress on camera, or share a private image. The moment they do, the tone changes completely. Suddenly they’re being told that the footage has been recorded and will be sent to their friends, family, or employer unless they pay.
The phishing email version. This one doesn’t require any prior contact. Victims receive an email claiming the sender has hacked their computer, installed spyware, and recorded footage of them visiting an adult website. To make it convincing, the email often includes a real password the victim has used obtained from one of the many data breaches that have leaked billions of login credentials over the years. The email demands payment in Bitcoin. The terrifying thing is that the criminal doesn’t actually have any footage at all. They’re bluffing, and they know that even a tiny percentage of recipients panicking and paying makes the whole operation worth it.
Financially motivated sexual extortion targeting young people. This is a rapidly growing and particularly disturbing variant. Organised criminal gangs often based in West Africa or South East Asia according to the National Crime Agency create fake social media profiles, frequently using stolen photos of attractive young people. They target teenage boys in particular, quickly moving conversations to sexual content and convincing them to share images. Once they have something, the blackmail begins immediately. The NCA has reported that some of these operations go from initial contact to blackmail in under an hour.
AI and deepfake sextortion. The newest and arguably most frightening version. Criminals take completely innocent photos of a person often scraped from public social media and use AI tools to generate fake explicit images. They then threaten to share these unless paid. The victim never shared anything intimate willingly, and the images don’t actually exist in real form, but the psychological impact is just as devastating.
Understanding which type you’re dealing with matters, because the appropriate response varies slightly between them. But the core principles of what to do and what not to do remain the same across all of them.
Who Is Being Targeted?
One of the most harmful myths around sextortion is that it only happens to people who were “asking for it” by behaving recklessly online. The reality is far more complicated.
According to data from the Internet Watch Foundation, 91% of victims in UK sextortion cases in 2023 were male. The National Crime Agency has specifically flagged teenage males aged 14 to 17 and male adults aged 18 to 30 as being at particularly high risk though they’re clear that anyone can become a victim. Childline reported providing over 900 counselling sessions to young people about sextortion in 2023/24, and more than 68% of those sessions involved boys.
But this isn’t just a young male problem. The Revenge Porn Helpline which supports adult victims of intimate image abuse in the UK has reported a significant number of female victims as well, particularly in cases involving real images shared within previous relationships. Adults in their 30s, 40s, and beyond are also targeted through dating apps and webcam sites.
The phishing email version, meanwhile, is entirely indiscriminate. Criminals buy leaked databases containing millions of email addresses and old passwords, then blast the same threatening message to everyone on the list. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve ever visited an adult site. Your email being on that list is enough.
The point is this: being targeted doesn’t mean you did something wrong. It means a criminal picked you, often at random, because they thought they could make money from you.
How Sextortion Scams Actually Play Out
Reading about something in the abstract is one thing. Understanding how it unfolds step by step is what actually helps you recognise and stop it in real time.
The Online Romance Trap
A new contact appears on Instagram, Snapchat, a dating app, or sometimes even through a gaming platform. The profile looks genuine enough. There are photos, maybe a small number of followers, a few posts. They message you out of the blue, expressing interest. They’re attractive, funny, and very keen.
Within days sometimes hours the conversation turns flirtatious. They might send an intimate image first, to make you feel like this is mutual and safe. They push gently but persistently for you to do the same, or to move to a video call. The pressure feels like natural romantic interest.
The moment they have what they need, the script flips. A different voice emerges sometimes literally a different person takes over the account. They tell you they have the images or video and they’ll send it to everyone in your contact list unless you pay. Often they’ll demonstrate they have access to your profile by listing friends’ names. The panic this creates is immediate and overwhelming.
This is the moment most victims pay. And then pay again. And again. Because the criminal has no intention of stopping, and they know the victim is too frightened to call their bluff.
The Threatening Email
You open your inbox to find a message that begins something like: “I know your password is [actual password].” It then claims that hackers have been in your system for months, have access to your camera, and have footage of you doing something deeply embarrassing. Pay within 48 hours, in Bitcoin, to a specific wallet address. Otherwise the video goes to everyone in your contacts.
The password is real. You recognise it immediately. This is what makes the email so effective it suggests genuine access when in fact that password came from a data breach that had nothing to do with your webcam or browsing history.
The National Cyber Security Centre is extremely clear on this: the criminals behind these emails do not know whether you have a webcam. They do not know if you’ve visited any specific websites. They are bluffing, and they send these emails to millions of people in the hope that a small percentage will pay.
The Organised Gang Operation
The more sophisticated version involves criminal networks operating with something resembling a professional infrastructure. These gangs are often based overseas the NCA specifically points to organised crime groups in some West African countries and parts of South East Asia. They build fake profiles in bulk, often using stolen photos of real women. They have scripts, targets, and daily quotas. They know exactly how to escalate pressure and how to research victims’ social connections to make threats feel more personal and credible.
In some cases, victims have reported receiving separate messages from what appeared to be the account of a person they knew, only to realise that account had been hacked and was being used as part of the scheme.
Warning Signs You Should Never Ignore
The patterns that indicate a sextortion attempt are consistent enough that knowing them can save you from a world of distress. Here’s what to watch for.
Someone contacts you out of nowhere and is unusually keen very quickly. Online connections that are too good, too fast, and too immediately romantic are classic manipulation tactics. Real people developing genuine interest take time.
Conversations escalate to sexual content surprisingly early. If someone you’ve met online within the past few days is steering things toward intimate territory, slow down.
They send an intimate image of themselves first. This is a very deliberate tactic designed to make the exchange feel mutual and safe. It lowers your defences precisely because it appears to involve them taking a risk too.
They want to move the conversation off a mainstream platform onto a different app WhatsApp, Telegram, or something else. This is partly to avoid content moderation and partly to make it harder to report them. As ReportFraud.police.uk notes, this platform switch is a consistent red flag in sextortion attempts.
Their profile has sent friend requests to a large number of people, not just you. This is something you can sometimes check on social platforms, and it suggests a mass-approach rather than a genuine individual connection.
They have very little genuine history few older photos, sparse interaction with other real accounts, and a follower count that doesn’t quite add up.
In the case of emails, you recognise a password included in the message. This is the key hook that makes phishing-based sextortion convincing, but remember that password came from a data breach, not from your computer being hacked.
What To Do Right Now If You’re Being Targeted
If you’re in the middle of this situation as you read these words, here is what you need to know in plain terms, without the kind of vague reassurances that don’t actually help.
Do Not Pay Anything
This is the single most important thing. Avon and Somerset Police put it plainly: if you pay, they will ask for more. The payment doesn’t end the threat it proves you’ll pay, which makes you a more attractive target for further demands. And despite the terror of the situation, offenders very rarely follow through on releasing material to contacts. The threat is the product. Once you’ve paid, they’ve lost their leverage, so they need a bigger threat to maintain control.
Stopping payment even mid-stream is almost always the right move.
Stop All Communication Immediately
Block the person on every platform. Don’t reply, don’t negotiate, don’t threaten them back. Engagement of any kind gives them something to work with. If you’re worried that blocking them will make them angry enough to act, understand that this is exactly what they want you to think. Their goal is always to keep you engaged and scared.
You may want to temporarily deactivate social media accounts to reduce their ability to harvest your contact list. This isn’t permanent it’s a short-term move while things settle.
Preserve Evidence First
Before you block them, take screenshots of everything the conversation, any threats made, the profile details, any payment demands, usernames, and email addresses. This evidence is essential if you decide to report to police (which you should), and it could be useful in having content removed from platforms.
Report It
In the UK, you have several options and you should use more than one.
Report to the police via Action Fraud (0300 123 2040), which is the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime. They can log the crime and in many cases connect you with appropriate support.
If the victim is under 18, report to CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command) directly. This is specifically designed for child online safety cases and is part of the NCA.
Contact the Revenge Porn Helpline if you are an adult. This is a dedicated UK service offering confidential support to victims of intimate image abuse and sextortion. They can provide practical advice on having content removed and emotional support.
For under-18s, the Report Remove tool operated by Childline and the IWF allows young people to confidentially report sexual images or videos of themselves to have them assessed and potentially removed from the internet.
Use StopNCII.org a free tool run by SWGfL and the Revenge Porn Helpline. It creates a digital fingerprint of your images without storing the images themselves, which can then be used to detect and remove them across participating platforms.
Report the profile to the platform where contact was made. Every major platform Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Tinder, and others has reporting mechanisms for this type of abuse.
Get Support for Yourself
The psychological impact of sextortion is serious. Feelings of shame, panic, isolation, and helplessness are completely normal responses to an abnormal situation. But they can become overwhelming without support, and tragically there have been cases where young people in particular have taken their own lives after being targeted.
You do not have to go through this alone. Victim Support offers free, confidential help to sextortion victims in England and Wales. Samaritans are available 24 hours a day on 116 123 if you’re struggling emotionally. If you’re a young person, Childline can be reached on 0800 1111, completely free and confidential.
CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) also offers support on 0800 58 58 58 from 5pm to midnight every day for anyone having difficult thoughts or feelings.
How To Protect Yourself Before It Happens
Prevention is, as always, better than cure. Most of the protective steps are genuinely straightforward they don’t require any particular technical knowledge, just awareness.
Tighten Your Privacy Settings
Go through your social media profiles and check who can see what. If your friend list, workplace, location, and contact details are visible to the public, you’re giving potential criminals the tools to make their threats feel more targeted and credible. The Metropolitan Police specifically advises tightening privacy settings as a key protective measure, noting that criminals are less likely to target you if they can’t see your network. Set your accounts to friends-only as a minimum.
Use Different Passwords for Different Accounts
If you use the same password across multiple sites, a data breach on one of them means criminals potentially have access to something that looks convincing across all of them. Use a password manager tools like Bitwarden, Dashlane, or 1Password are good options and make each account password unique. Enable two-factor authentication wherever possible. This won’t stop every attack, but it closes off one of the most commonly exploited weaknesses.
You can check whether your email has been involved in a known data breach at Have I Been Pwned, which is a free service that monitors billions of leaked records.
Be Sceptical of New Online Contacts
This isn’t about being unfriendly or paranoid. It’s about being appropriately thoughtful. If someone you’ve never met is being very charming, very keen, and very quickly sexual, pause. Ask yourself whether the pattern makes sense. Do a reverse image search on their profile photo on Google or TinEye to check whether the image appears elsewhere online under a different name. Fake profiles almost always use stolen photos.
If a conversation moves toward intimate content sooner than feels natural, trust that instinct. You’re allowed to slow things down or disengage entirely.
Think Before You Share
This applies to everyone, not just people who consider themselves at risk. Intimate images shared within trusted relationships can end up in the wrong hands through hacking, relationship breakdown, or simple bad judgement on the other person’s part. The IWF’s ongoing Think Before You Share campaign highlights the long-term consequences that can come from images shared in what felt like a private, trusting context.
If you do share intimate content with a partner, you might consider images that don’t clearly show your face or other identifying features. This reduces the potential damage significantly if images are ever shared without consent.
Cover Your Webcam When Not in Use
It sounds simple because it is. A small piece of tape or a purpose-made webcam cover costs almost nothing and eliminates the possibility of anyone using malware to activate your camera without your knowledge. This doesn’t protect against criminals claiming to have footage they’ll claim it regardless but it removes any doubt from your own mind and prevents any genuine recording.
Keep Software and Devices Updated
Malware that can access cameras and microphones is real, even if in most sextortion cases it isn’t actually being used. Keeping your operating system, browser, and security software up to date closes vulnerabilities that attackers might try to exploit. The National Cyber Security Centre provides excellent guidance on protecting your devices and accounts from cyber threats of all kinds.
A Note for Parents: Protecting Your Children
If you’re a parent or carer, the statistics around young people and sextortion are alarming enough that this deserves its own section.
The NCA issued an urgent alert in 2024 following a dramatic global increase in cases targeting young people globally, cases reported to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children more than doubled in a single year. In the UK, the vast majority of young victims are boys, and the crimes are being committed by organised criminal gangs who treat this as a commercial enterprise.
The most important thing you can do is talk to your children about this before it happens to them. Not in a way that shames or frightens them, but in a way that lets them know you’re a safe person to come to if something goes wrong. Children who’ve been targeted often feel that they’ll be in trouble, that you’ll be angry or disappointed in them, and that telling you will make things worse. You need to make clear explicitly and repeatedly that this isn’t true.
Explain the mechanics in age-appropriate terms. Let them know that criminals create fake profiles, that they often pretend to be other young people, and that if anyone online ever asks for intimate images, that’s a serious red flag. Explain that they should never share such images, but also that if they ever do and something goes wrong, you will help them full stop, no judgement.
The NSPCC has excellent resources for parents on talking to children about online safety. Childline’s Report Remove tool is specifically designed for under-18s and allows young people to take action themselves if they need to.
Watch for warning signs in your child’s behaviour. Sudden anxiety around devices, reluctance to go to school, unexplained requests for money, social withdrawal, or distress when their phone is taken away could all indicate something is going on. These signs can indicate many things, but sextortion should be on your radar as a possibility.
The Legal Position in the UK
It’s worth being absolutely clear that sextortion is a criminal offence. Perpetrators can be prosecuted under several pieces of legislation, including the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Sharing intimate images without consent or threatening to share them is illegal under legislation that has been strengthened in recent years.
The Online Safety Act, which has been coming into force progressively since 2023, places new obligations on social media platforms to detect, remove, and prevent the spread of harmful content including intimate image abuse. While enforcement is still developing, this represents a significant shift in how the law treats platforms that host or fail to act on this kind of content.
This means you have every right to report what’s happening to you to police, and you should feel confident doing so. These criminals are breaking the law. You are not in trouble. Even if you shared something consensually and are now being blackmailed over it, you are the victim.
If Someone You Know Is Targeted
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t dealing with your own situation it’s knowing someone you care about is going through this and not knowing how to help.
The most important thing you can do is not make them feel judged. Sextortion victims already feel enormous shame, and if their first experience of telling someone is met with “why did you do that?” or “how could you be so stupid?” even asked from a place of genuine shock it can push them further into silence.
What they need from you is calm, practical support. Sit with them. Help them go through the steps above. Help them make the reports. Be the person who stands between them and the panic long enough for them to think clearly.
If they’re very young, or very distressed, or you’re worried about their mental wellbeing, contact Childline (for under 18s) or the Samaritans immediately. The psychological impact of this crime is real and can escalate quickly without support.
The Deepfake Dimension: What’s Changing in 2025
AI is changing the sextortion landscape faster than most people realise. The tools available to criminals now allow for the creation of realistic fake explicit images using nothing more than a handful of innocent photographs the kind that most people have publicly visible on social media. Research by security firms has found thousands of Bitcoin wallets specifically linked to deepfake sextortion schemes.
This means the threat model has expanded. You no longer need to have shared anything intimate for criminals to claim they have intimate images of you. The realistic quality of AI-generated content means that even someone who knows for certain no such images exist can be shaken by the threat.
The UK government and law enforcement are catching up. The Online Safety Act specifically addresses deepfake intimate images, and the government has signalled further legislative action. Creating sexually explicit deepfakes of real people without their consent is now a criminal offence in England and Wales under the Criminal Justice Act amendments that came into effect in 2024.
If you receive a threat that involves deepfakes, the response is the same as for any other sextortion: don’t pay, don’t engage, report to Action Fraud and the Revenge Porn Helpline, and use StopNCII to help prevent genuine or fabricated images from spreading.
Quick Reference: UK Resources and Contacts
For convenience, here are the key places to go for help in the UK.
Report the crime:
- Action Fraud 0300 123 2040 (adults reporting to police)
- CEOP Safety Centre for under-18s
- Crimestoppers 0800 555 111 (anonymous reporting)
- Your local police call 101 for non-emergency
Get images removed:
- Revenge Porn Helpline for adult victims (over 18)
- Report Remove via Childline for under-18s
- StopNCII.org image fingerprinting to prevent spread
Emotional support:
- Victim Support free, confidential support
- Childline 0800 1111 (free, for under-18s)
- Samaritans 116 123 (free, 24/7)
- CALM 0800 58 58 58 (5pm–midnight)
Advice and guidance:
- NCSC guidance on sextortion emails
- IWF sextortion resources
- Met Police sextortion advice
- NSPCC online safety resources
Sextortion scams work because they exploit the things we’re most afraid of humiliation, the loss of other people’s respect, the exposure of our private lives to the people who matter most to us. The criminals behind these schemes understand human psychology, and they’ve built their operations around exploiting it.
But here’s what they’re counting on you not knowing: in most cases, the threat is empty. They don’t have footage. The email is a bluff. The profile was fake. The “friend” who got in touch is a criminal halfway around the world who will never follow through on their threats because doing so would give them nothing and lose them a potential income stream.
And even in cases where there is real material where something was genuinely shared and is now being used against someone paying almost never makes it stop, and reporting almost always helps.
The most powerful thing you can do is refuse to give them what they want: your panic, your money, and your silence. Don’t pay. Don’t engage. Report it. Get support.
You are not alone in this. These crimes are happening to thousands of people in the UK right now, and the system police, charities, platforms, and law is increasingly set up to help. Use it.