Sextortion had claimed the lives of four men in the United Kingdom in a year, the National Crime Agency and the National Police Chiefs’ Council said in November 2016, after they fell prey to criminals who tricked them into performing sex acts in front of a webcam, recorded them and demanded money. Reports of webcam blackmail had more than doubled in a year, from 385 in 2015 to 864 in 2016; in 2011 there had been nine (NPCC, 30 November 2016). “We look after dozens of cases a year, but I was surprised to hear there were 864 cases reported to the police. I think it is more likely to be two or three thousand people who are affected by this crime,” I told Sputnik at the time. The criminals learn enough about the victim to make the threat credible, and the shame does the rest.
What has changed since 2016
The crime has grown out of all proportion to those figures. In April 2024 the National Crime Agency took the unprecedented step of sending an alert to every school in the country, reporting that global reports to the American clearing house for these cases had more than doubled in a year to 26,718, that the offenders were mostly organised gangs in West Africa and South East Asia, that boys aged 14 to 17 and men aged 18 to 30 were the main targets, and that a gang could move from first contact to the demand in under an hour (NCA, 29 April 2024). The law has moved too. Threatening to share an intimate image is now a specific offence under section 66B of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, added by the Online Safety Act 2023, alongside blackmail itself under section 21 of the Theft Act 1968, and the platforms on which these gangs operate must now remove intimate image abuse and blackmail as priority illegal content once told of it.
What to do
The advice of the National Crime Agency has not changed and neither has mine. Do not pay: a victim who pays has shown that he can, and the demands continue. Do not delete anything: keep the messages, the account names and the payment details, because they are the evidence and the addresses for service. Stop all contact and report it to the police and to the platform, and if you are under 18 use the NCA’s reporting routes and the Report Remove tool, which will take the images down. And know that the civil courts move faster than the blackmailers: in 2026 the High Court granted injunctions within days against a sextortion gang, named the men behind the accounts, kept the victims anonymous and ordered the gang to disclose who had received the money, in one case on a Saturday for a Monday deadline. Those cases are told in The Seeking honey trap and The case of RXE v Daniel Ryan and others. You do not need to know who they are to stop them, and you do not need to have sent anything explicit.
First published 5 December 2016. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.