Teens and the hidden crisis of sextortion: why fraud tactics drive grooming and why teens rarely report it

Sextortion is becoming one of the fastest-growing online threats facing teens, yet it rarely receives the same focus as bullying or explicit content. Part of the reason it’s so difficult for platforms to moderate is that the harm doesn’t start with sexual imagery. It starts with deception.

Dr. Michael Skidmore of The Police Foundation, an independent think tank specializing in evidence-led policing policy, has spent nearly a decade researching how fraud operates online. He explains that the same tactics used in financial scams, such as false trust, emotional mirroring, pressure, and scripted relationship-building, are also the tactics that drive sextortion and grooming.

Offenders use these techniques to build credibility, present as peers, and draw teens into situations that can become coercive, sometimes gradually, but often very quickly. Where the motive is profit rather than sexual exploitation, Skidmore notes that offenders may take a more scattergun approach, moving rapidly to sexualized content in order to extract small amounts of money from a large number of young people.

“Teens are so active online in environments where fraud risks are pervasive,” Skidmore says. “If you’re in those environments more, you will be exposed more.”

Because sextortion begins with behavior that feels ordinary, such as friendly messages and encouragement, many teens don’t recognize the danger until leverage has already formed. And once it escalates, shame, fear, and confusion keep most victims silent.

The result is a largely hidden crisis with far more victims than official reports capture.

Why teens are the “perfect targets”

Teens aren’t targeted for sextortion because they’re naïve. In fact, many are highly confident online, and it’s that confidence that can increase risk.

Skidmore notes that qualitative studies and platform-level signals point in one direction: teens are exposed not simply because they spend more time online, but because fraudsters actively target vulnerability. As a result, spaces heavily used by young people can themselves become high-risk environments.

Gaming platforms. Social media. Fast-growing e‑commerce spaces. Peer-to-peer exchanges.

In Skidmore’s view, the shift of fraud into online spaces “fundamentally changes the dynamics of criminal behavior,” because teens are digital natives who inhabit those environments far more intensely than adults. If fraud is a crime of opportunity, then these environments create near‑constant opportunities.

And critically, young people tend to be overconfident in their ability to detect scams. Skidmore agrees this overconfidence makes them more vulnerable, a pattern that’s also reflected in Google’s behavioral research on online manipulation. That work, led in part by Google’s Jigsaw team, suggests people are more resilient when they learn to recognize emotional cues, like pressure or urgency, rather than trying to memorize the endless list of scam formats. This helps explain why teens, despite feeling “digitally savvy,” are still at high risk.

Fraud, sextortion, and grooming: unexpected overlaps

Sextortion and grooming are usually treated as separate categories of online harm, but Skidmore argues that fraud sits at the heart of both. Deception is the entry point. As he explains, “fraud, in its simplest sense, is deception” and that simple mechanism drives both financial scams and the early stages of grooming and sextortion. Offenders create a false sense of trust, build a relationship, and draw the young person into interactions that later become leverage.

Skidmore says that these cases follow a predictable sequence that tends to unfold in three stages:

1. False trust-building. Offenders create the illusion of shared age, interest, or social circle. Teens judge authenticity based on how well someone seems to “fit” their environment.
2. Incremental engagement. The offender gradually normalizes more private or intimate exchanges, often through grooming-style attention.
3. Leverage and coercion. Once an image or interaction occurs, the tone shifts. Pressure, threats, or emotional manipulation follow.

In criminology, this is often called a “crime script.” It starts with presenting as someone trustworthy, often a peer, then encouraging the exchange of images or personal information. The coercive stage comes later, when offenders flip that trust into pressure or blackmail. At every stage, fraud – the deliberate creation of a false reality – drives the process.

He also highlights a worrying pattern in that boys are being disproportionately targeted in sextortion schemes. While this trend is only now gaining broader attention, it illustrates how fast harm can evolve when platforms and policymakers aren’t watching closely.

Yet another emerging challenge is the use of AI tools in grooming and sextortion. Generative AI lowers the barrier to producing convincing personas and polished messages, or even fabricated images that make fraudulent interactions seem more credible. This adds a layer of sophistication that teens, who may be confident in their digital abilities, often underestimate.

The overlap also highlights a bigger issue: teens may not recognize these situations as fraud at all. If they don’t see the early stages as criminal, they are less likely to seek help or report what happened. That misrecognition is part of what makes sextortion such a powerful form of harm and is why Skidmore believes fraud needs to be recognized as a foundational building block across multiple abuse types, not only financial scams.

Why teens rarely report sextortion, even when they know they’re victims

Teens are far less likely than adults to report fraud or grooming, and sextortion carries even more barriers. Skidmore identifies several likely reasons:

Shame and self-blame

Even when teens know they’ve been manipulated, they often believe they “should have known better.” The emotional tone of sextortion – embarrassment, fear, guilt – makes silence more likely.

Not recognizing the early stages as a crime

Teens may not interpret early deception as wrongdoing. If the interaction feels mutual or friendly, the shift into coercion is confusing. Skidmore warns that many young people don’t recognize these experiences as crimes when they happen, particularly when they disengage early and avoid harm, leaving the initial approach unreported.

Fear of consequences

Teens worry about their parents finding out, losing access to devices, being blamed or punished, or the incident becoming known at school.

Belief that platforms or police won’t act

When victims do report, responses can be inconsistent. Teens may assume law enforcement “won’t care or won’t do anything,” Skidmore notes.

Lack of anonymous, teen-specific reporting channels

Many reporting systems are designed for adults, with formal language, long forms, or unclear next steps.

These barriers create the “dark figure” of unreported harm, where the scale of sextortion is far greater than official numbers suggest.

Grooming as manipulation: why the fraud lens matters

Viewing grooming solely as a sexual harm overlooks the mechanics that make it possible. Fraud techniques, such as impersonation, false intimacy, emotional mirroring and fabricated personas, are the tools offenders use to gain access and earn trust.

Skidmore argues that treating grooming through a fraud-informed lens provides clearer insight into how to intervene. If early deception is understood as part of the crime, then platforms can act sooner.

For example, sudden shifts in tone, invitations to move to private channels, attempts to isolate a teen from peers, pressure framed as urgency or secrecy, unusual patterns of flattery or attention. These are all behaviors platforms can detect, interrupt, or flag without waiting for explicit sexual content.

Why platforms struggle to intervene early

Platforms face several structural barriers that make it difficult to act during the earliest, most preventable stages of sextortion and grooming.

Skidmore points out that many safety systems are built to detect explicit content rather than the behaviors that lead up to it, and early manipulation rarely involves sexual material. It begins with conversation, attention, or subtle pressure. These interactions blend seamlessly into the flow of normal social activity, which makes them difficult to distinguish from everyday messages between teens.

He also highlights the tension between meaningful detection and user privacy. Identifying early-stage manipulation often requires understanding tone or relational patterns. But monitoring conversations deeply enough to catch those cues risks feeling intrusive. He describes this as “a fine line” between protecting users and overstepping into surveillance. No platform has fully resolved this tension.

Reporting systems present yet another obstacle. Teens often find the language formal, the steps unclear, and the tone more adult-centric. If they do not see their experience reflected in the reporting categories available, they simply avoid engaging with the system.

Cross-border offending adds a further complication. Offenders frequently operate outside the victim’s jurisdiction, and even when platforms identify patterns of abuse, law-enforcement referrals can be slow or inconsistent.

Another issue is structural separation: grooming, sextortion, and fraud are often handled by different parts of trust and safety teams. This fragmentation means early deception, which is the core mechanism all these harms share, doesn’t always trigger coordinated action.

Finally, cross-platform collaboration is still limited. Alliances exist for CSAM, where industry norms and data-sharing frameworks are better established, but similar infrastructure for sextortion and fraud-driven grooming is only beginning to form. Offenders move between platforms more easily than the systems designed to stop them.

These gaps mean platforms often intervene after the harm has escalated rather than at the earliest moment when manipulation begins.

Platforms can improve all of these areas with better safety design, but the incentives and frameworks aren’t yet in place.

Prevention needs to focus on feelings, not formats

Traditional education teaches teens what scams look like, but sextortion doesn’t follow a single pattern.

Behavioral research supports a different approach: teaching young people to pay attention to how manipulation feels. Skidmore sees this as promising because emotional cues remain consistent even as tactics evolve.

Key feelings that signal risk include pressure to respond quickly, secrecy framed as intimacy, flattery that escalates rapidly, fear of disappointing someone, sudden emotional intensity.

Teaching teens to recognize these feelings empowers them to disengage before coercion takes hold. It also helps them understand that early behavior is part of the harm, which increases the likelihood of reporting.

Real-time prompts, such as “Are you sure you know this person?”, “Take a moment before sharing,” “This request looks unusual,” give teens a way to slow down and re-evaluate.

What needs to happen next

Skidmore’s research with Birkbeck, University of London aims to uncover how teens experience fraud-shaped harm in social and gaming environments. The goal is to produce granular insights that can help reshape prevention, reporting, and platform design.

Sextortion and grooming are fraud problems as much as sexual harm problems, and until platforms and policymakers recognize that deception sits at the center of both, they will continue to intervene too late.

Teens need reporting tools that reflect their emotional reality, safer defaults that interrupt manipulation early, education focused on cues, not content, systems that treat fraud as part of sexual harm prevention, not separate from it.

If platforms want to protect teens effectively, they must focus on the earliest stage of the crime script: the deception that starts it all.