What is sextortion and can banks help to prevent it?

Growing up is hard enough. But young people face more pressures today than would have been imaginable a few generations ago. Do you really know what happens on your child’s phone?

Sextortion, a financially motivated form of online blackmail, is the fastest-growing scam affecting teenagers globally. Boys as young as 12 have committed suicide. 

The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit, received 26,718 reports of financial sextortion in 2023 alone, up from 10,731 reports in 2022.

Meanwhile, the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation reported an eightfold increase, with 91% of cases involving young boys. 61% were aged between 16- and 17-years old. 

The situation has become so dire that the National Crime Agency issued a rare warning to all UK schools to watch out for sextortion-related abuse.

It’s hard to trace and even harder to prosecute. But banks are uniquely positioned to help law enforcement in their efforts. They just need to know what to look for. 

What is financial sextortion?

Sextortion often starts on social media. Criminal gangs, pretending to be girls of a similar age, infiltrate schools and friendship groups online.  They connect with multiple profiles to make it seem like they are a mutual friend of their victim, before starting a conversation. 

The messages are innocent at first; the criminals begin chatting and flirting. Sometimes they start a ‘relationship’. Before long, the interaction moves to WhatsApp where end-to-end encryption makes the victim feel more comfortable. 

Once trust has been gained, the boy is lured into sending sexually explicit images and videos of himself. 

If he does, the script flips. The attackers start demanding money, threatening to share the explicit material with the boy’s parents, school friends, and teachers. To prove they’re serious, the abusers share screenshots of the victims’ followers and start group chats with their close friends.

Scared, many victims do as the criminals say. But when the money runs out, the extorters keep pushing. They slowly release the images, sometimes offering employment as a money mule or to recruit other children.

Feeling they have nowhere left to turn, some victims commit suicide. In a tragic case, Murray Dowey, a 16-year-old boy from Dunblane, Scotland, killed himself hours after receiving the threats. 

Why are teenage boys the target of financial sextortion?

For criminals, teenage boys offer the shortest path to being paid. They’re impressionable, interested and flattered by the attention they receive.

It makes them likely to overlook the fact that things may not be as they seem, and, when things go south, unlikely to discuss their issues with their friends or family. It’s a dangerous, sometimes fatal combination, and it makes them particularly vulnerable.

The abusers, often based in West Africa, look for specific characteristics in a child’s social media profile to understand if they are a good fit.  That could be the way they dress, the type of content they share, whether they travel, or if they’re in a relationship. The wealthier and more willing the target, the bigger the opportunity.   Gangs follow well-orchestrated scripts that tap into the psyche of their victims, pulling strings to manipulate their fears.

At 15, it can feel like your world will end if your friends and family see the images. You don’t realize you have options, that there are places you can turn to get help, and it’s not your fault. 

But the so-called ‘Yahoo Boys’ (named after their preferred email provider) are relentless in their pursuit.

The criminals are so brazen in their approach that many post tips, tricks, and scripts on TikTok, flaunting their lavish lifestyles online, paid for by children whose lives are being ruined. 

It takes enormous effort, funds, and international collaboration for the perpetrators to be caught. You can’t just fly from London to West Africa to arrest someone.

There are physical and virtual barriers that often prevent financial sextortion crimes from being investigated.

Besides, criminal organizations are sophisticated. They deliberately avoid detection from anti-financial crime teams by using a network of individuals and a variety of payment methods.

Multiple criminal actors – money mules, facilitators, offenders – are involved. They send account-to-account transfers, crypto, and gift cards, at first from the victim and then to one another to muddy the flow of funds. 

That makes it difficult for banks, without proper information, typologies, and red flags, to detect when sextortion is happening. But it’s not impossible. 

How can banks help to stop financial sextortion?

Cryptocurrency on its own is not necessarily a red flag for sextortion, nor is a gift card. But when this is new behavior from a minor who suddenly starts to spend hundreds of pounds on untraceable financial products, alerts must be raised. 

• Why are payments being made from a minor to an account in a high-risk country with which they have no apparent connection?
• Why has a minor started buying cryptocurrency?
• And why are they spending hundreds on gift cards? 

There are patterns to pick up on. If we know what to look for, we can start to spot behaviors that may indicate cases of financial sextortion. And with that, we can help to prevent it. 

With the right education, monitoring, and awareness controls in place, anti-financial crime teams can make a real difference in financial sextortion detection. Knowing who is involved, what methods they use, and what behaviors they exhibit can give banks a means to flag sextortion cases. 

Banks need these persona-based typologies that list red flags specific to their region, so they know where to look.

They need to be able to combine it with key data from the web and other sources, to quickly assess gaps in their defenses and investigations, and then find ways to address them. To support victims, stop perpetrators, and prevent financial sextortion for future generations. 

The RedFlag Accelerator

The RedFlag Accelerator uses a persona-based approach to help banks and AML vendors find the patterns of behavior hidden within banking data. Banks are given customer profiles, red flags, and contextual information about a wide range of crimes, such as sextortion, human trafficking, and pig butchering.

With this information, you know what to look for and can spot behaviors in places you may not have found before. 

The time will soon come when banks are no longer just morally obligated to act, but legally. Find out ways to better detect financial sextortion by downloading our free sextortion investigation guide.