The National Crime Agency has warned international cybercriminals that it could seek to extradite them as part of a crackdown to tackle an alarming rise in the numbers of young people being targeted for sextortion.
The agency said the gangs, often based in west Africa, were “not safe from prosecution in our country” and that it would seek justice for all victims of the crime.
In cases of sextortion, teenagers are tricked online into sending intimate pictures of themselves to fraudsters who then demand money and threaten to share the material with others.
The Guardian has learned that detailed guides to sextortion in written and video formats are available freely online, with criminals offering individual tuition for further payment.
The NCA said it would introduce a new recording measure to assess the extent of a crime described by the child safety watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) as “the biggest trend we’ve seen and one of the cruellest”.
Sextortion has been implicated in the deaths of at least two UK teenagers in recent years. Dinal De Alwis, 16, from south London, described by his parents as a “golden boy”, took his own life after being blackmailed over nude photographs.
Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane, died soon after he was targeted by online blackmailers. His parents told the Guardian how their family had been “absolutely shattered in the space of a few hours”.
Organisations supporting victims are calling on the Labour government and crime agencies to make sextortion a priority to prevent “more lives being devastated”.
The IWF, which monitors child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, said there had been a 19% increase in reports of child sexual abuse material related to financial sextortion in the first six months of this year compared with a year ago.
It received 89 confirmed reports of sextortion-related content involving under-18s, compared with 75 in the same period in 2023. The data shows a surge in female victims, from one last year to 27 in 2024, while the number of boys – typically more often targeted in sextortion cases – fell by 12% to 61.
Tamsin McNally, the manager of the IWF’s hotline that allows members of the public to report suspected CSAM, said the reason for the rise was probably that “now perpetrators have become more adept at what they’re doing, they’re widening their nets because they know they can make money”.
Most of the cases seen by the IWF are classed under the lowest category of CSAM, category C. The most affected age group was 16-17, with 45 victims, and the biggest increase was in 14- to 15-year-olds, up by a quarter to 40.
McNally said: “Sextortion is the biggest trend we’ve seen and one of the cruellest. It’s something I see on a daily basis, with reports coming to the hotline internationally as well as from the UK.”
The NCA says west Africa, and Nigeria in particular, has become a hub for sextortion gangs. In early June the agency hosted a four-day visit from Nigeria’s National Cyber Crime Centre (NCCC) to London, where they discussed fraud and a range of cybercrimes including sextortion.
The Nigerian authorities have been active: two Nigerian men were extradited to the US in August 2023 to face charges relating to online extortion and their alleged part in the suicide of a Michigan 17-year-old, Jordan DeMay. And earlier this year two men were charged in Nigeria over the alleged sexual extortion of a 16-year-old Australian boy who took his own life last year.
Adam Priestley, a senior manager at the NCA, said extradition was not the only option and agencies may work with foreign law enforcement to bring perpetrators to justice in their home countries.
“It is the ambition of the NCA to work together with UK and international partners to achieve a judicial outcome”, he said. “In particular where a young person has died, we strive for a judicial outcome that adequately reflects the severity of the crime. If you offend against people in the UK, this is what happens. You are not safe from prosecution in our country.”
The NCA acknowledged that it remained challenging to accurately estimate the scale of sextortion because it cuts across different recording categories, such as blackmail and fraud. The agency now plans to introduce a specific category for recording sextortion cases.
Sean Sutton, another NCA senior manager, said: “We are in the processes of agreeing the use of one codeword to use across law enforcement help track the scale and better coordinate our response to this threat moving forward.”
The Guardian has seen evidence of the international scope of this crime, presented by perpetrators themselves. In one written guide, which runs to more than 80 pages, the writer claims that the top three countries in which to commit successful online extortion are the UK, the US and Canada. They advise the reader to focus on teenagers and young adults and suggest that they can expect to receive sexually explicit content “from at least 5-10 targets out of 200”.
Sophie Mortimer, the manager of the Revenge Porn Helpline, which supports over-18s with a range of online abuses, said sextortion cases had increased “massively” since the line was set up nine years ago. She expressed frustration that the issue had “only become any sort of priority for the NCA relatively recently”. The NCA said it had started awareness raising about the issue in 2016.
She said: “Lives are being devastated. We need to see more political will about tackling these issues. We know the money is going abroad, and it’s going to the same countries again and again. It’s going to the Philippines, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Morocco. My big ask of the new Labour government and senior police officers is to start taking some action.”
