Experts are warning parents to monitor children’s internet use as online sextortion cases surge.
SAN ANTONIO — Your child is at risk if he or she has access to the internet and experts say you need to be monitoring them now – if you are not already. Children and teens are being targeted for “sextortion” and it can happen in a matter of hours and while the children are in your home.
On this episode of Deep Dive with Sarah Forgany, a new streaming series from KENS 5+, an investigator and a victim’s specialist sat down with Sarah to talk about what they are calling an epidemic of sextortion cases they are seeing.
See the full episode here and on KENS 5+: (article continues underneath)
What is sextortion?
The issue is described as meeting someone online through chat apps, social media messengers, or text messages, and sharing photos and images. with that person.
“A lot of times they think they are talking to someone their age, and [the scammers] already have sexually explicit videos of somebody they have already scammed and they will send it to this new victim,” Supervisory Special Agent Rex Miller of the FBI San Antonio Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force said. “So that victim thinks they are talking to this other minor and the new victim sends videos.”
At that point, Miller says, the scammers will start asking for money with threats to send the photos the victim’s friends and family members. The kids and teens, the experts said, are afraid to tell their parents and will often comply with the scammers’ demands for fear of being exposed.
“We had a victim up in Austin…and with that individual, the individual sextorted her for over $21,000 and he just recently got 20 years. But, she just could not get away from it,” Victim Specialist Christi Traver Pahl of the San Antonio FBI Field Office said. “She was 16 when it started.”
She says the child victim had been dealing with it for years and was afraid to tell her parents.
“That’s why we get so many reports from the children themselves calling the FBI. Probably half of our sextortion leads that come are kids themselves calling, because they don’t want to go to their parents, and they don’t have that other trusted person they can go to,” Miller said.
Miller and Traver Pahl say they are seeing huge numbers of cases happening in all parts of San Antonio and Austin.
“It’s an epidemic. Just to give you can example, our squad in San Antonio, and I have some agents up in Austin, probably this year, we have received 320 leads just with regards to sextortion,” Miller said.
Dealing with victims
With such a sensitive subject matter, the child victims and their families are handled in a very careful way. Traver Pahl is a victim specialist and is on the front lines of approaching families.
“We are very, very conscious and careful about how we make that contact with the parents. We’re very well aware that parents 9 times out of 10, they are not gonna know that any of this has happened,” Traver Pahl said.
She says one of the most important aspects of her job is to reassure parents that their child is a victim, regardless of whether they sent something on their own. She says she tells parents the child was coerced by someone else to do what they did by scammers who looking to profit.
“I think normalizing for parents to call the police. Because I think there is that innate shame factor of ‘I don’t want anyone to know that my child got involved in this, I don’t want it out there,'” Traver Pahl said. “As soon as we introduce ourselves and explain why we are at the door, the first thing we say is, ‘your child is not in trouble with us.'”
Moving forward
Traver Pahl says the consequences of these crimes go way beyond losing money.
“The kids aren’t telling their parents and it’s happening in a matter of hours and you know they’re these kids a lot of times don’t think they can get out of that and they say in their 15-year-old brain that this is the end of the world,” Traver Pahl said. “That’s when we see ‘this is gonna ruin their lives’….this is why we see the suicides and especially with boys because the shame is higher.”
The FBI says if you have not had a conversation about this with your kids, you should.
“I don’t think there’s a too soon to talk to your children, especially if they have access to any kind of electronics, gaming. iPads, you know, even the most innocuous game like Rex was talking about,” Traver Pahl says. “His example where the child was playing a a child-friendly game. We’ve responded to cases where the child was playing a game called Omelet Arcade.”
If you have been a victim of this crime, or if you suspect someone of being a victim, please reach out to the FBI at tips.fbi.gov. They also recommend the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as a resource for families dealing with this sort of problem.