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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Today's episode was made possible by our friends at the Department of Education, Victoria.
Ready? And good morning. This is the Daily Aus. This is the Daily Aus. This is the Daily Aus. Oh, now it makes sense.
MUSIC
Good morning and welcome to The Daily Oz. It's Monday the 8th of June. I'm Emma Gillespie.
I'm Sam Kozlowski.
Australia's online safety regulator received more than 3,000 reports of sexual extortion last year, with young men the most targeted group. Sextortion is a form of online blackmail and sexual abuse, and experts warn this is a crime growing rapidly in scale and sophistication due to generative AI. eSafety is now turning the tables on scammers by using AI itself in a new campaign.
And to talk us through that decision, as well as this latest data, we are joined by eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant in today's Deep Dive. You're going to hear that chat in just a second. But first, here's a quick word from the TDA team. Hi, I'm Skye, part of the partnerships team here at TDA.
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Chapter 2: What alarming trend is emerging regarding online sexual extortion?
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant, thank you so much for talking to us today. We're chatting sextortion. How would you describe sexual extortion or sextortion to someone who's never heard of it before?
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.
In 2025, eSafety received more than 3,300 reports of sexual extortion. 86% of those complaints were from men and around half of total complaints were from men aged 18 to 24. So that really young age group. How has the profile of this crime shifted in recent years? Did that figure surprise you in terms of that younger end of the spectrum?
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 your friends and people from an adjacent school, they do their research in advance.
In many cases, sextortionists are overseas, as you have flagged. So what kind of tactics have you seen them use to make themselves appear local and legitimate? Because many victims think that they are talking to someone in their suburb or state or somewhere in the country, right?
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Chapter 3: How does sextortion impact young men specifically?
You can report to the Australian Center for Countering Child Sexual Exploitation if you're under 18 or if you're a parent of under 18 because it becomes child sexual abuse material. If intimate imagery or the threat to share is live, you can report to eSafety at eSafety.gov.au. We have an image-based abuse scheme. I have a 98% success rate in terms of getting that content taken down.
We can also do referrals onto law enforcement. But the most important thing is to get support. So I talked about that common tactic of is isolating a person. That's to make them panic so that they will pay We've had young people come to us who've had to negotiate and say, you know, I'm 16. I don't have $10,000. And they will negotiate down to get what they can.
But what we've also seen is once you pay, they know that you're willing to pay and they will keep coming back and they will hold on to that imagery. And they'll also be relentless. They'll be very persistent. You may have blocked them on Snap, but they might find you on Messenger or iMessage or Telegram and try and reach you in different ways.
So just be sure that you're blocking, you're taking screenshots, you're collecting evidence, not only of the account it came from, but what kind of payment mechanisms are they asking you to use? You know, we work with other organizations like Oztrak, and they do that work of tracking down where the financing is going. But the most important thing is get support. Talk to a person you trust.
Talk to a parent. I've talked to a lot of parents who've lost children to sexual extortion. And every single one says to me, we were right down the hall. They would have just knocked on the door. We would have helped them. We would have helped them through this.
We'll be right back with more of today's chat with eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant right after a quick word from today's sponsor.
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Yeah, I did want to ask you about that, I suppose, shame and embarrassment. We see this with, you know, any kind of range of scams where victims will often feel that initial humiliation that I can't believe I fell for this or whatever it may be, and that will stop them from reporting or seeking action.
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