The Guardian has been reporting on the sharp rise in financially motivated sexual extortion – commonly known as “sextortion”.
Teenage boys and young adult males are often the targets, duped into sharing intimate images of themselves with a stranger who then threatens to share those images online unless they pay up.
Law enforcement agencies report that the perpetrators are most usually loosely organised cyber-criminal gangs based overseas.
Tragically, a number of young men in the UK, as well as the US and Australia, have taken their own lives after being targeted in this way.
