Roughly 35 ‘sextortion’ reports since November, says ICE co-ordinator

Parents should speak to their children about the dangers of the internet, according to Saskatchewan police.

Especially about what police like to call “sextortion” schemes.

“Sextortion” describes an online trend of teenagers being coerced or manipulated into sharing nude or sexual photos of themselves.

The teenagers are then blackmailed into sending cash to the scammers.

Staff Sgt. Tim Failler with the Saskatoon Police Service spoke with Gormley this week and said that the provincial Internet Child Exploitation Unit (ICE) has logged roughly 35 reports about sextortion since November.

Failler is also the co-ordinator for the provincial ICE unit.

He said they receive between 10 to 15 reports each month.

“That’s just what’s being reported,” he said. “We feel that there’s probably a high number of cases that aren’t being reported.”

Failler said that the intimate nature of the scam probably prevents children from reporting it out of shame.

He told Gormley that teenage boys are the primary targets of the scams and that the scammers often try to get them to send photos by posing as teenage girls on social media.

“I can tell you, I’ve seen them and the profiles that are on (social media) look 100 per cent legitimate,” he said. “It’s typically a picture of a female in her teens. Some of them even have 1,000 followers and they’re following 1,000 other people, and they post (on social media) just like most teenage girls do.”

Failler said that because the profiles can look so convincing, boys should be immediately wary of anyone who initiates a sexually explicit conversation with them.

“You should be asking a lot of questions as to how they know you (and) why they’re contacting you and you should be suspicious,” he said.

“They will sometimes provide a photo or video or say they’re going to do that themselves. And they convince you to do the same and immediately upon the victim providing that video or that photo of themselves nude, the suspect then tells them this: ‘you need to listen to me very closely and if you don’t provide me money, I’m going to send this to all your contacts in social media, whether that be Snapchat, Instagram. I’m going to put it on YouTube, I’m going to send it to your school.’ We’ve been hearing all that sort of thing.”

Failler said his advice would be for teenagers to not take any photos or videos of themselves nude. As well as for parents to have open conversations with their children about how to protect themselves against these types of scams.