It begins with a follow request. An 18-year-old male accepts one on Instagram from an attractive female stranger. She likes his posts, messages him first, friendly, flattering, quick to move the chat to a messaging app.

Within an hour she has shared an intimate image and asked for one in return. The moment he sends it, the flirtation stops: pay, or his image goes to his mother and every friend the blackmailer has found on his profile. A countdown begins.

This is a fictional scenario, but in 2025 the eSafety Commissioner received more than 3,300 reports of sexual extortion or “sextortion”. The vast majority of reports were made by male victims.

A national survey by the Australian Institute of Criminology found more than one in ten Australian adolescents have experienced sexual extortion, over half of them before they’d turned 16. Two in five were targeted with digitally manipulated material, and two-thirds by someone they had only ever met online.

In addition, new national research published last week found that among young people who had sexual images shared without consent, one in four said AI was involved.

eSafety’s latest transparency report, released today, draws on answers platforms must provide under Australia’s Online Safety Act. It reveals many platforms are still not using available tools to detect this crime. Yet sexual extortion is arguably the most predictable serious crime on the internet. It follows a script.

A crime that follows a script

Sextortion is a form of blackmail in which someone........

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