Julie Inman Grant

Well, yes, the full term is sexual extortion, sextortion colloquially, and it's really a form of online blackmail where someone threatens to share a nude or a sexual image or video of you unless you give in to their demands.

This is a little bit scary, but there are two kinds of sexual extortion that we're seeing.

One is called sadistic sexual extortion, and it tends to target young girls, often for more sexualized content or contact offending.

What we're really talking about today is financial sexual extortion, and a lot of this is

really lucrative for organized criminal gangs.

So a lot of them are based overseas and they tend to target young men between the ages of 16 and 24.

And it's almost always for money.

Well, we've really seen a huge spike in this kind of harm type over the past five years.

We first started seeing this over COVID, and the target was generally international students.

And that makes sense, right?

Often international students are from means they're paying full tuition.

They may not understand the dating conventions here in Australia.

They're away from home.

Everything was being done online.

We even had a poor Swedish backpacker that ended up at our offices looking for help.

So that's when we started to see it.

And again, then the blackmailers or the overseas criminals started to realize that the Nigerian print scam or entering the lotto and winning the lotto that you never entered was not being as lucrative.

This is a pretty ingenious way to target young men who make

might want to take a risk, have a sexy chat.

You know, there's a hot blonde who's, you know, reached out to you and seems to know