The internet has opened a world of opportunity for young people—but it has also created new dangers. One of the most alarming is sextortion, a form of online exploitation that disproportionately targets children and teens, often with devastating emotional and psychological consequences. As predators use social media and gaming platforms to manipulate and coerce youth, the urgency for awareness, early intervention, and prevention has never been greater.
On this episode of Inside the Sweeps, we’re joined by Greg Hansen, Supervisory Special Agent with the San Diego FBI unit, to shed light on the growing threat of sextortion. We’ll explore how this crime impacts young victims and their families, the patterns law enforcement is seeing, and the critical steps being taken to stop it. Join us for an important conversation about protecting kids and confronting the realities of online exploitation.
Welcome to Inside the Sweeps, where guest host John Robb will be diving into a pressing issue regarding online safety. In today’s episode, we’re joined by Supervisory Special Agent Greg Hansen from FBI San Diego to discuss a growing digital threat: sextortion. As predators increasingly target youth through social media and gaming platforms, understanding how these crimes happen—and how to prevent them—is more important than ever. Join us for a vital conversation about protecting kids online, supporting victims, and how the FBI is working to stop these crimes at the source.
John Robb
Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us on our podcast Inside the Sweeps. Today we’re joined by
Supervisory Special Agent Greg Hansen from the San Diego FBI unit.
Greg, could you start by introducing yourself and sharing a bit about your role at the FBI, particularly in relation to investigating cases of this sextortion?
Greg Hansen
My name’s Greg Hansen. I’m a special agent with the FBI. My official title is Supervisory Special Agent, that is because I am the supervisor in San Diego of our Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Squad. So, I essentially am in charge of all the investigative and operational efforts that go into combating crimes that relate to children or crimes that relate to human trafficking.
John Robb
I don’t imagine that’s a hard thing to do on some days, Greg, so thank you for doing that. Our topic today is Sextortion. I’m not sure everybody understands sort of what that is. Can you describe a little bit about how that typically hurt or occurs? What are the key tactics? What is the actual crime and how is the digital age changing that?
Greg Hansen
No, I appreciate you having me on to talk about this because we have seen a spike in these types of illicit activity as it relates to sextortion. What a sextortion is essentially, is a criminal act that involves an offender coercing a minor to create or to send explicit images or videos. What they do typically is they’re going to try to target a minor, try to groom them, which is probably the best term to describe it.
In the process of grooming them, they’re building that rapport and setting up a situation in which they might be able to coerce them into sending some sort of sexually explicit, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a photo. And then at that point, once they receive that, that’s essentially the catalyst for them to begin that sextortion. Where they begin to then extort them for either money, which we refer to as a financially motivated sextortion, or they extort them for additional images, content, maybe even having contact with that child to engage in some sort of activity.
John Robb
Sounds pretty serious. Why is this such a, a big issue? What is the impact this has on the victims, particularly young people and, and why is law enforcement is taking a closer look at this now?
Greg Hansen
We’ve seen a huge spike in these type of sextortion cases, over the last few years. For example, from 2021 to 2022, we saw these types of reports of, sex extortions increase by tenfold. And we’ve continually seen that continue to increase. Now, not quite tenfold, but over the years I believe the next year after that, we saw about a 20% increase. I would say we’re consistently receive receiving tips that are in line with about 20 to 30% increase from the, the prior year.
So, it’s, it’s definitely a problem. It’s, I might even call it an epidemic. We’re seeing as more and more children get online, have access to their own personal devices, their smartphones, laptops, tablets, they have that opportunity now to be exposed to these criminal actors that are online looking to target them.
And these can have long-term effects, right. When a child is sex extorted, essentially what is happening, and I talked a little bit about the definition of what sextortion is, they are being coerced online by bad actors to produce, sexually explicit images of themselves and if they’re not creating those, they sometimes will coerce them to just engage in that type of activity and stream it to the subject or the bad actor on the other end of that line. And they are recording it. The children may not know that they’re being recorded, but they’re recording it.
Once that first photo or video gets out there, it is out of the control of that child. Now that bad actor can use it. That image or that video to then further extort the child for various types of purposes.
And as I mentioned before, there is your traditional sextortion where it is typically motivated by somebody who’s looking to either engage in sex with a child or to obtain images or videos of a child that are sexually explicit. And then there’s the financially motivated side where they’re just looking to get money. They will extort them. They’ll send these images back to them and say, if you know I’ve got this image and if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do, then I’m going to distribute these out to family or friends – to classmates in order to get them to comply.
As we’ve seen this increase over the years, and we’ve seen the impact that it can have on children, when those photos get out, the increased anxiety that comes from being in a situation where you’re extorted as a child. We’ve tried to get ahead of that. We’ve tried to educate people, educate parents so that they know what they’re looking for. Educate children so that they can see some of the signs to possibly avoid being victimized online in, in this type of heinous crime.
John Robb
We didn’t explicitly say this, but it is effective, right? This does work, they are genuinely extorted. It’s not like they just ignore it; it actually has real world impacts.
Greg Hansen
Absolutely. Yes. And I touched on this and maybe this is a good time to sort of break out sort of the two broad categories of sextortion, but it does work.
Number one, the sexually motivated sex extortions, where you’ve got a bad actor online who’s looking to engage in some sort of sexual activity with a child. So, they will make contact with them. This is typically done through gaming platforms. It’s done through social media. It’s done through online chat forums where they begin to talk to them. Quite often these, these predators will identify places where they’re going to get a whole group of children or minors that they can sort of blend in, pretend like they are of similar age, maybe similar background from maybe, the same geographical location. Then they’ll begin to converse with them, build a little bit of rapport, and then typically they’ll move them over to a separate application, a platform, something that allows for web streaming or calls or chats where they can then begin to talk to them and sort of ramp up that sexual activity.
Sometimes they will actually send something ahead of time of either, themselves that is sexual in nature, sometimes it’s AI generated in order to get the child to then start to feel a little bit more comfortable in engaging in this type of activity. When they’re looking to get or they’re driven by obtaining additional sexually explicit media involving a minor that is sexually motivated sex extortions.
On the financial side, there are bad actors, and these are typically overseas actors who are engaged in this as well, but their motivation is money. They are looking to target as many minors as possible in order to extort them. Once they’ve done that, they will begin the process of trying to get them to send them money. And it’s not a lot of money usually. We’ve seen as high as maybe, you know, requests for $2,000, but as little as $10 where they are just looking to get anything they can out of a victim.
They take the same sort of methods that the sexually motivated sex extortionists are taking. That is identifying children in these, what we call wolf packs, where they are in like a gaming platform. They’ll go into those platforms; they may even identify a victim. They can obtain some sort of hacked account to make it look like they are using an account that is of a child that is around their same age, starts interacting with them, Instagram, Snapchat, any of these types of platforms, and then have them move over.
John Robb
This brings me to, to, one of the points that I certainly want to convey here is that there’s this misconception that sextortion targets girls, but when you talk about these gaming platforms, maybe boys are more targeted in that way. Can you talk about, if it is agender thing? Are there more boys than girls? More girls than boys? Is it the platforms? Like why is it a bigger issue for boys? I think we really need to drive this home, especially when boys want to be kind of brave.
Greg Hansen
I think the easiest way to break that down is the sexually motivated extortions, primarily target females. Whereas the financially motivated sex extortions primarily target males, and that is just the pattern that we have seen and the ages for females on the sexually motivated sex extortions are ranged from about 10 to 17. We’ve seen, seen them as young as seven.
On the financially motivated sextortion side, the males are typically 14 to 17 in age, and the reason why they target males is because they feel more comfortable that males are going to feel more ashamed and more embarrassed and be more reluctant to go to an adult to report it. They’re just going to pay out in hopes that it will go away and, unfortunately, they find out that it doesn’t go away. A lot of these have actually led to suicides. I think we’ve got upwards of 20 documented suicides by young males, minor males, who have been victims of financially motivated sextortion.
John Robb
It’s hard enough being a kid today, just being a kid. Never mind these kinds of problems. We’re very concerned about suicide. It is an area that we focus on as well, and it’s the second leading cause of death amongst youth globally.
It’s a real concern and we don’t need to add anything to that, like for sure. You talked about being afraid to go to parents. In the past, parents taught their kids about stranger danger. Avoiding suspicious individuals in the online world, you talked about these approaches they come in as friends or colleagues or something like that. How is this different than the stranger danger and is that even effective to talk about that? Like how do you communicate that?
Greg Hansen
I mean, I think to an extent, you can tell children to not communicate with somebody you don’t know online but I think when you talk about stranger danger, I think you’re right – it’s not a very effective approach when you’re talking about engaging with somebody online.
So, for example, if you’re a minor and you’re in a gaming platform and there’s several people playing the same game, and it appears that all of you are roughly the same age, you’re all interested in this type of game, and there is somebody there who starts conversing with you; start talking to them, you feel as though you might actually know them. You’ve gotten to know them as you’ve played this game with them online. You feel like you’re part of this sort of community. You have similarities so they don’t feel like strangers, right? So that is, that’s where this, conversation about stranger danger sort of breaks down because the child actually feels like they know this person and then they start talking. They feel like, okay, let’s move to a separate platform so we can discuss other things outside of this gaming platform. And next thing you know, it is an adult. And they may tell them they’re an adult at some point they may not. They may get them to actually produce what we call child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, I may use that acronym, just so that you’re aware of what it stands for. But they may get them to produce CSAM and then at that point, that is, as I mentioned before, that’s sort of that catalyst to begin that sextortion.
John Robb
So, these predators are kind of like “good at it”, right? It’s not their first time typically, they’ve been working up to this, they’ve done it multiple times. The victim, it’s their first time being a victim, but the predator has done it many times.
Greg Hansen
Exactly.
John Robb
What are some of the red flags that parents or educators, or even friends might be looking for when they think that something is going on? Are there common behaviors, emotional signs? How does somebody close to that victim help them identify that maybe there’s a problem here.
Greg Hansen
Well, one of the main things that these predators attempt to do is try and get the child to feel alone and isolated, right? So, if the child is pulling away and isolating themselves, then that’s a sure sign. Like you’ve definitely, as a parent, got to step in and you’ve got to start talking to your child because the more that that predator can pull them away from trusted adults, be it a teacher, be it a parent, be it a neighbor, someone at church, he longer they can carry this thing out.
We’ve actually seen some of these sex extortions carry on for months and years. Typically, the financially motivated sex extortions are fairly quick. They may last only, anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. But the sexually motivated sex extortions can last for years at a time.
And the child may not necessarily say anything, but you will see them pull back. You’ll see increased anxiety and depression. They won’t want to interact as much with friends those sorts of things. They may be reluctant to now go to school because if there’s a threat hanging over their head that some sexually explicit material of them could potentially be distributed to their friends, they’re not going to want to show up at school in the fear and the embarrassment that comes with that.
John Robb
So even if there’s no evidence, you can start to see them trying to avoid situations where they’ve already been threatened via this extortion. You know, if you don’t do this, I’m going do that. They start thinking, that might have already happened. They don’t want to go to these things. Maybe they want to go to their room, use a different tool, use a different laptop, like whatever it is to try and avoid anybody seeing anything. Is that sort of what you experience?
Greg Hansen
Yes, absolutely. And with regards to the financially motivated extortions those ones, you’re going to start to see some transactions. You’re going to start to see, typically these young men are looking to money somehow. We’ve had a lot of parents who have made reports where they said, I saw this strange transaction on. You know, my cash app or something like that, or some other financial transaction that went through them where the kid is trying to sort of obfuscate it and that didn’t work.
The parent identified it and then they started to talk to the parent, or to the child, to the minor. They learned a little bit more about the situation, but yes, a lot of pulling away, a lot of going to their room by themselves because they have to continue to engage with this person, either through sending additional media or there’s always a lot of explanations as to why they can’t pay on the financial side so they don’t want that interaction to happen in front of parents. So, they might tuck themselves away in a bedroom. They may do it away from the home, somewhere in between, you know, school and, and home in a place where they know that they’re not going get discovered.
John Robb
Where nobody’s watching them and what it is that they do.
Greg Hansen
Yep.
John Robb
I mean, this has got to be tough – emotionally, psychologically for these kids. They’re feeling the pressure, the shame, all of those kinds of things. You’ve already mentioned that it sort of shows up as depression and anxiety, like those are some of the things that you see. What are some of the other things that happen to kids? I mean, we see the ultimate is suicide. I suppose that is sort of the worst situation. What is out there to help kids once you’ve identified we’re going to stop this. What’s out there to help kids? Is there any place they can go? Do you have any advice there?
Greg Hansen
Yes. Local law enforcement is starting to have increased awareness of sextortion, so it can be reported to local law enforcement. It can be reported to the FBI, it can be reported through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that we call it NCMEC, at missing kids.org and every one of those places.
I can speak to the FBI, at fbi.gov, I can speak to ncmec@missingkids.org have tremendous amount of resources that can help educate us, that can help us for example, if you are a child who was exploited as the victim of an extortion and some content was created, and let’s say it was broadly distributed, now that is out there, there are efforts that NCMEC heads up, called Take it Down, takeitdown.org. Where you can actually work with them to get any images that might be out there of your child taken down, or of yourself if you’re now an adult and now you see some images that popped up, you can work with take it down in order to get these things taken down because these can have long lasting effects.
We see this will affect children who have been victimized of these types of crimes as they become adults, they go out into the workplace and you and I both know that when people are going to apply for jobs and, and that sort of stuff. They’re looking at social media, they’re jumping on the internet and getting into search engines, and you know, checking up on these people. And those things can come back to bite these, bite these victims. We’ve seen it and it’s had long lasting effects. It can affect their life both on a personal level and a professional level for many years to come.
And so, we try to make sure that we have those types of resources to help them deal with that. The FBI has a very robust victim services program. When we have a report of a sextortion, we will make contact with the parent, the guardian and offer those types of resources that they can then tap into at a local level.
Most municipality is going to have some sort of victim services that are available that they can tap into if they’re a victim of these crimes. So, it’s important that they get reported. We, I always tell people three easy things when you find out your child is being sex extorted, and that is Block, Report and Preserve. Block the bad actor, report it to law enforcement, and then preserve the accounts, preserve the interactions because that helps us with our investigations.
If they are here in the United States, the sub, I’m talking about the subject or the predator, then that’s a lot easier for us to investigate. There are some significant violations, federal violations – a lot of these will go Fed. If you’re talking about, production of what we call CSA or child pornography, that’s what you’re doing when you’re extorting a child, then that is a 15-year mandatory minimum on the Fed side, so that’s significant. If you’re a registered sex offender, it’s 30 years, so there’s some significant weight behind these statutes on the federal side, so we’ll investigate those.
The challenging ones can be those financially motivated extortions, where we’ve got most of our predators are actually overseas. They are typically criminal groups. Some of them are a little more organized than others, but we’re primarily seeing them out of Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and the Philippines. And they come in, they pretend like they are a young female, they’ve got hacked accounts. They may hack your child’s account. If they can’t get them to produce, they may actually use AI generated child pornography with maybe superimposed photo of your child’s face on that and then say, I’m going send this out. They create these collages of the child pornography with your friends list next to it. Says, I’m going to send that snapshot, that screenshot of that image, and I’m going to send these out to all the people that you know, all your friends list, unless you comply. And those overseas bad actors, they’re hard to get to. We have a good relationship with those partners over there to go after them.
John Robb
We’re involved in protecting children and adults against CSAM. And we’re involved with the IWF, the Internet Watch Foundation and some other organizations. NCMEC, we’ve had conversations with them. We’ve written about face swapping in images; we’ve written about revenge porn and take it down like. We will make sure that in our podcast notes here, we put some resources for people to get to, on the written materials because it is important that they get to these things, because the internet does have this really long memory and we have to do what we can.
We have to do what we can to mitigate the results of it happening. I think like most things, Greg, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Greg Hansen
Absolutely.
John Robb
If we can say, okay, prevention here is the critical part. What can parents and other people do to protect our kids online? Like schools are a big part of their life. They’re in school many hours in the day. The schools have a School Resource Officer. I don’t know that reporting is going to be really big there because this works because of the shame, right? If there was no shame, this crime wouldn’t work, right? But it works because of the shame.
So, what, what can we do to be preventing this? Like what can parents, schools, guardians, like, what can people be doing? What would you suggest?
Greg Hansen
Well, I think the first thing that I would recommend is have that conversation now. Don’t wait, especially, don’t wait until it’s already happened. And that’s, I think that’s sometimes where we see people stumble, is they wait until it happens. They think it’ll never happen to me or my child and then it does. So, have that conversation now. It’s important to start that conversation and get to the point where it is comfortable. Reoccurring conversation that you can readdress at any time. Kids are always going to get a little bit of a little squirmish or squeamish, I should say, when the parent starts to talk about this type of, of crime, right? And I get it. I think if I were that age, I would be squeamish as well if my parents approached me on something like this. But as you start to sort of break down those barriers the kids start to feel a little bit more comfortable, and you start to have that conversation about, you know, about the types of predators that are online, the methods that they use in order to target minors. And those are, we’ve talked about them, but those are available on NCMEC, right? They’re available at fbi.gov. You can see, we can help drive that conversation so that you know what you’re talking about.
I think it helps to get familiar with the applications that your kids are using. They are on these gaming platforms. What do you know about that gaming platform? They’re on these social media platforms. What do you know about these social media platforms? So, getting up to speed as a parent on some of those so that when you have that conversation, you know what you’re talking about.
There’s monitoring software. I’m a big proponent of making sure that you have full access to your child’s devices. If they have devices, you should know what those passcodes are. You should be able to get into them and look at them at any time. And the child should know that I think if they’re going to jump some sort of, you know, webcam, session, then it should be in an open space. Parents should know about it.
On top of all that, having that conversation, understanding, the, the platforms where kids get targeted, how they get targeted. Knowing that these predators are portraying themselves as younger individuals typically and having that conversation. You’ve also got to have them exercise good cybersecurity, because sometimes we do see devices getting hacked by these predators. And when they hack these devices, sometimes there are compromising photos that the child might have in their device or in that account or they just use existing photos to use this AI generated photo that shows them in a compromising, sexually explicit situation that they can then use to hang over the child’s head to extort them.
So, all of these types of things can help, but it really begins with that first conversation. And then that sort of opens the door to talking about the cybersecurity aspect, to talking about the platforms. I’m going to check your phone every few days, I need to know the password, if you want an app – talk to me about it and those sorts of things.
John Robb
It’s about reducing the risk, right? We can’t limit one hundred percent. We have to mitigate the risk and whatever tools we can bring to bear to mitigate that risk, observation, questions, conversations, software tools, we have to do all of the various things to mitigate that risk wherever that happens to be.
Greg, this has been fabulous information. I think it’s very helpful for people to start those conversations, understand that this is a real issue. What would you give as your final advice to parents and educators and guardians about keeping our kids safe online?
The online part’s not going away so how do we mitigate that risk, as we were talking about, for those younger people that don’t have the life experience to necessarily be aware that they’re being manipulated. What would you suggest there? Is there another place to look?
Greg Hansen
I think we probably need to really strongly consider the age at which we’re giving free access to the internet and devices to our children. I think, and that may not necessarily be a popular view, but I do think that we do need to consider, we need to look at what age am I handing over a smartphone to my child? And you’re starting to see more and more monitoring applications, devices that only allow certain types of, of interaction so that the parents can still stay in touch with the child, but that they’re not, you know, it’s mitigating that risk.
So, I do think that we do, as parents need to be careful. I know our kids at age 11, 12, they want a device because all their friends have a device. Is that such a smart idea? And if we give them a device, what are the parameters? Have we established those parameters? That’s a perfect time to have that conversation that I talked about where you say, okay, we’re going to talk about a device.
Here is a device, but this device can only do X, Y, and Z and it’s not going to have any access to any social media. You know, these are just suggestions that I’m making. But I do think, and this is going to be on an individual basis, for each parent. But I do think that it’s important for us to maybe sit back and think, okay, do I really need to follow this trend of giving my child unfettered access to a smartphone and social media and the internet such a young age?
Maybe we need to reconsider that because really, it puts them out there in a way that you’ve just increased the possibility of them being victimized online because there are so many of these predators out there. They’re countless. And it’s hard to get ahead of it, and it’s hard for us to investigate it all.
John Robb
So, we need parents’ help. I think that the internet’s a very powerful tool. But you know, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility.
Greg Hansen
Right.
John Robb
And I think that, you know, as a parent myself, I look back on what I did with my kids when they were growing up, and I may have some regrets about how easy I made it for them. Sure, they’re digital natives now and they do all of those things. But was I, me personally, when I look back now, knowing what I know, working with people like the FBI and the things that I work with, IWF, NCMEC. Did I make the right choice for my kids? I’m not sure, but like you say, it’s an individual decision, right?
Everybody has to decide for themselves and their family what’s the right thing to do? And having those conversations and the open communication, that’s got to be the answer. That’s how we get the responsibility part of that great power, right, is we’re responsible. We have conversations, we work through those things. I agree with you, and we do see it. Every day. CSAM, you know, we see the CSAM reports that our system finds. We talk to schools all the time. Like we know that this is a real issue, and we see the really negative outcomes as it relates to emotional distress and self harm.
Greg, I think that you’ve provided some great info here from the FBI and your experience. We certainly appreciate it.
Thank you very much for taking the time with us. It’s been a great conversation, and I wish we could do more. I feel like I really want to do more right now based on this conversation that we’re having.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Greg Hansen
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Resources to Report Sextortion and Protect Children Online
If you or someone you know is experiencing online exploitation, it’s important to know you’re not alone—and help is available. To report incidents or access support, visit the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) at www.missingkids.org, where you’ll find the CyberTipline, victim support resources, and educational materials to help families and educators stay informed. NCMEC also offers Take It Down, a free service that helps remove explicit images from the internet.
The FBI provides additional support and tools at www.fbi.gov, including its Tipline for reporting online exploitation and child sex trafficking, the Safe Online Surfing (SOS) program for students, and resources on sextortion and human trafficking.
For broader initiatives and legal support, the Department of Justice offers Project Safe Childhood at www.justice.gov/psc, focused on protecting children from online predators and exploitation.
Staying informed and proactive is key to protecting children in today’s digital world. Let’s work together to raise awareness, support victims, and stop sextortion before it starts.