An online safety regulator in Australia says big technology platforms need to do much more to protect young people from sexual extortion. According to the eSafety Commission, teenagers are facing a massive wave of attacks where bad actors trick them into sharing private photos and then demand money. More than ten percent of teens between sixteen and eighteen have fallen victim to this crime, often starting before they turn sixteen.
Platforms must find clear ways to block repeat offender scripts
The latest report points fingers at several large companies, noting that Google and Meta fall short in catching these bad actors. Scammers typically pose as teens to build trust, send a fake explicit picture, and ask for one in return. Once the victim replies, the scammer threatens to send the images to family and friends unless a payment is made.
The core issue involves how these apps handle text monitoring. “The specific failure named is language analysis. Sexual extortion offenders work from recognisable scripts, the same coercive phrases repeated across thousands of approaches, and the report says platforms are not deploying the technology that would spot them.”
The regulator stated that apps like WhatsApp often lack clear reporting buttons for sexual extortion. Apple also caught criticism over how iMessage handles these threats. The safety group suggested the company could scan for these common scam phrases directly on the iPhone without breaking user privacy.
Apple already uses similar on-device scanning to blur nude photos sent to children. Recent test versions of its mobile software show the company might be testing a malicious message detection feature to solve this exact problem.
For now, safety groups are making it clear that the technology industry holds the tools to stop these scams at the source. If a company steps up and uses the tracking methods already available to it, it can cut off these extortion scripts before the messages ever reach a teenager’s screen.
