.png)
The Script Behind Sextortion: What Offenders Do, and Why It Reaches Every Age
Last week’s U.S. and Nigeria announcement shows that cases are moving forward across borders. Knowing how the offender works is still the best tool families and agencies have.
On November 3, the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria announced deeper cooperation with Nigerian authorities against financially motivated sextortion, romance scams, and other cybercrime that crosses borders. The numbers in that release show how much has changed. Since 2022, the FBI’s Legal Attaché Office in Abuja has worked with Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on 41 extraditions, five of them completed in 2026. From 2012 to 2021, the two countries recorded only four arrests and five extraditions. In August, Nigeria extradited two men to the United States who now face charges in separate sextortion cases involving American minors who died by suicide.
That’s real progress, and it matters because these crimes have rarely led to consequences. Extraditions still come after the harm is done, though. The more useful question for parents, educators, law enforcement, and corrections professionals is what the offender does before anyone reports anything, and how to recognize it while it’s happening.
The scale, from primary sources
The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report says the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received more than 75,000 submissions about sextortion in 2025 and referred more than 5,700 submissions involving minors to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Separately, the embassy release reports that NCMEC received more than 50,000 reports of financially motivated sextortion in 2025, which is about 137 a day.
The age breakdown in the FBI report is what most people don’t expect. Complainants under 20 filed 11,316 sextortion reports, but the largest group was ages 20 to 29, with 22,061 reports. The biggest reported dollar losses came from people 60 and older, at more than $14.8 million across 6,121 reports. Sextortion is often described as a crime against teenagers, and teenagers are among its most vulnerable targets. The data shows it reaches men, women, and children at every stage of life, and the playbook barely changes from one victim to the next.
All of these figures come from voluntary reporting. The FBI itself notes that shame, fear, and confusion keep many victims from asking for help, so the true numbers are higher.
How the offender works
GUARD’s approach starts with the offender, because offenders follow patterns, and patterns can be taught. The FBI’s own description of sextortion lines up with what our field research shows about how these schemes run.
First comes the approach. Contact can begin on any app, game, or messaging platform. Most often, the offender poses as someone the victim’s own age who seems interested in a relationship, or as someone offering something of value. Profile photos and videos aren’t proof of identity, since they’re often stolen or altered, and in some cases offenders take over a real person’s account.
Next, the offender moves the conversation somewhere else. The FBI warns specifically about someone who meets a young person on one platform and then asks to talk on a different one. That move takes the conversation away from moderation and reporting tools and into a place the offender controls.
Then the offender gets an image. Once they have a single picture or video, the tone changes almost immediately, from friendly to threatening. The offender demands money, gift cards, or more images and threatens to send the content to family, classmates, coworkers, or followers.
Finally, the offender escalates and keeps the victim isolated. Offenders count on the victim feeling too embarrassed or afraid to tell anyone. The FBI is clear that paying doesn’t end it, and offenders often release the material anyway or keep demanding more. Speed is part of the strategy, because a frightened person who believes they have only minutes left is less likely to stop and ask for help.
Every one of those steps is a point where someone who knows the pattern can step in. A parent who has explained the platform-switch warning sign, a teacher who knows what sudden panic over a phone can mean, and an officer or corrections professional trained to recognize the script in a report or in an offender’s own communications are all in a position to interrupt it.
One mother did exactly that after attending a sextortion course we taught to a community group. That very evening, she checked her son’s phone and discovered he was being sextorted. We later learned he was only days away from taking his own life. She knew what to look for because she had been in that room, and that is why we do this work. One conversation, one class, and one parent who knew the signs made the difference.
What to tell the people in your life
The FBI’s guidance is simple enough to share at the dinner table:
Don’t pay and don’t send more. Payment rarely ends the threats.
Stop responding, but don’t delete the conversation. Save usernames, messages, and screenshots as evidence.
Block the account and report it to the platform.
Report it to the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or tips.fbi.gov, and if the victim is a minor, to NCMEC’s CyberTipline.
Tell a trusted adult. The person being targeted is the victim of a crime, not the one in trouble.
That last point carries the most weight. The FBI says the cycle continues because victims are afraid of the offender’s threats and afraid they’ll be punished. When a child, a college student, or a grandparent knows ahead of time that the people around them will respond with help instead of blame, the offender’s biggest advantage disappears.
With the holidays coming, many families will hand out new phones, tablets, and gaming systems. That’s a natural time to have this conversation, before the device is unwrapped.
Where GUARD fits
GUARD Against Trafficking offers several levels of training, from foundational awareness to in-depth instruction on how offenders select, groom, control, and exploit their victims. All of it is built on offender- and survivor-informed field research on grooming, sextortion, crimes against children, and human trafficking. We train law enforcement and corrections professionals along with the many other people who are positioned to see these crimes, so each audience learns how offenders think and operate and can get ahead of the behavior instead of only responding after the damage is done. Cases like the ones behind last week’s announcement show what’s possible when people know what they’re looking for and partners work together across borders, and GUARD will keep putting that knowledge in the hands of those who can use it.
If this was useful to you, please share it with a parent, a teacher, or anyone whose work puts them in a position to recognize these crimes.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Originally published on GUARD Against Trafficking’s Substack.
Comments