The FBI received more than 7,000 reports last year of online sexual extortion of minors. Reports more than doubled from 2019 to 2021
The private messages to an 11-year-old Bergen County girl on Snapchat, which is used by more than 100 million people in the U.S., were friendly and innocuous.
The girl, who was in the sixth grade, thought she was talking to a peer, and the two traded messages as weeks turned into months.
It was around the time when the coronavirus pandemic gripped the nation. The girl was told how pretty she was. Flattered, and over time, the friend she thought she was making asked for an intimate picture. It took convincing. The person cajoled her into it with an offer to send some money if she did. A picture was eventually sent.
No money was sent and the person quickly asked for even more explicit images. The girl said no.
Like a thunderbolt, the perceived friend went from asking to demanding. The person wanted a video. Correctly identified where she lived. Even knew her father’s name and had an idea of what he did for a living. If she didn’t agree to send more, a threat was made: the images she sent would be posted on the internet — or worse, her family would be harmed.
“She got really scared. She thought she could handle it herself,” the girl’s mother, a parent of four, told NJ Advance Media. “It was awful.”
The mother, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity to fully share her daughter’s story, only found out because another parent contacted her after the girl confided with a friend. The incident was reported to the police but there was little expectation at the time that much could be done. The predator was never caught, she said.
What happened to the girl is more common than you’d think.
She was a victim of sexual extortion — commonly known as sextortion — where minors, and even adults, fall prey to seemingly friendly people through apps on their smartphones who convince them to send elicit images. Once an image is sent, the predator usually demands more images or cash.
Long gone are the times when law enforcement would simply warn parents of dangerous people on the street. From online video games to every other app that connects to the world, people on the hunt to sextort victims lurk under bogus usernames and identities.
The FBI received more than 7,000 reports last year of online sextortion of minors that claimed there were at least 3,000 minors who were victims of the crime, according to a public safety alert the FBI issued in January. The FBI did not have a breakdown for how many were reported in New Jersey.
More than a dozen of those young victims died by suicide, distraught with feelings of being ashamed, not knowing who to turn to, and thinking their world has imploded.
Increasingly, the victims are young boys who are lured into sharing explicit images, the FBI said.
“The predators know just from casual chatting what is bothering the child,” FBI Special Agent Kevin Matthews, who oversees the agency’s Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Squad, told NJ Advance Media.
“They build an element of trust with whatever that is … and then they exploit that,” Matthews said. “These predators don’t have one victim. They get one kid and they’re on to the next and they have 20 or 30.”
When people have been prosecuted for sextortion, it’s common for investigators to uncover a trove of files predators keep on each of the victims as they keep track of them and take notes to groom the child into a sense of false comfort.
“We’re seeing a large increase,” Matthews said. “We’re talking nationally close to 200 reports that we’re seeing a week.”
More tragically, national groups that monitor sextortion insist the figures are a colossal undercount.
“This is the new space that we live in,” Lauren Coffren, the executive director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s Exploited Children Division, said. “This is a new education that has to happen.”
Since 2016, the group’s national tipline had more than 262,500 reports of online enticement, which included sextortion. And sextortion reports more than doubled between 2019 and 2021.
But those are just what’s been reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
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By Matt Arco | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash
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