The FBI reports a significant increase in the incidence of financially motivated sextortion.
Poster for the documentary film, "My Sextortion Diary."
The FBI sounded the alarm in December about an explosive increase in teenage boys being targeted online and extorted for money after being tricked into sending sexually explicit pictures.
Sen. Ted Cruz, right, greets from left, Brian Montgomery, Kristin Bride and Maurine Molak after a press conference, Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023. Cruz spoke on the proposed Kids Online Safety Act, (KOSA). Montgomery lost his son, Walker, 16, to suicide in 2022 due to sextortion. Bride lost her son, Carson, 16, in 2020. He died by suicide after he was cyberbullied. Molak lost her son, David, 16, in 2016 to suicide after he was cyberbullied.
Patricia Franquesa was angry when thieves ran off with her laptop in Madrid just hours before a meeting to share the latest edit of her documentary film. She wasn’t thinking at all about the three nude photos on the hard drive.
Hackers soon reminded her.
Within a few weeks, hackers emailed Franquesa, informing her they had found the photos, accessed her email and downloaded her social media contacts, including business associates on LinkedIn. They demanded $2,600 deposited in bitcoin, or they’d share her photos with her world.
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Franquesa did what documentary filmmakers do: she started recording everything. The result was “My Sextortion Diary,” which I saw at its world premiere at the South by Southwest Conference and Festivals in Austin.
Sexual extortion is a rapidly growing global cybercrime where criminals demand cash or additional explicit materials from their victims. In most cases, once the victim accedes to the blackmailer, the extortion continues until the victim runs out of money.
Franquesa’s film reveals the cat-and-mouse games extortionists play yearly on hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide. In January, the FBI revealed it has recorded more than 13,000 cases involving juveniles since October 2021, with the rate spiking over the past six months.
Experts advise victims to contact the police and save the emails but never reply. Franquesa followed that advice, expecting the blackmailer to send her photos to her contacts all at once. But the hacker sent the pictures to a few contacts at a time over several months, routinely embarrassing her and amping up the pressure to pay.
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The tactics are mind-bending for an adult, as the film shows, but can devastate teens, who are increasingly the targets. In the United States, at least 20 teens have died by suicide following sextortion attempts, the FBI said.
Franquesa took matters into her own hands after one of the Spanish investigators asked her to take nude photos of him and his wife and the hacker showed no fear of getting caught. I’ll give away no spoilers.
Sextortion is a growing problem, but hackers soon won’t require any authentic source material. Artificial intelligence allows them to create sexually explicit images that are convincing enough.
Online companies sell users access to a program called FaceShifter to overlay photos onto pornographic actors in videos.
“We’ve reached a level where we can use even one photo, and the result will be indistinguishable from the original,” one site claimed. “And in the end, we get the perfect overlap of the face with the other person’s body.”
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Such videos and images are known as deepfakes and, revoltingly, some cretin has made one for almost every female public figure. While they are realistic, most are clearly cut-and-paste jobs. Advances in AI, though, could make identifying deepfakes more difficult.
Governments and the AI industry are worried about how criminals may use deepfakes to blackmail people and spread disinformation. But so far, there are no good ways to label AI-generated content, according to Che Chang, general counsel for ChatGPT maker Open AI.
“We are sharing best practices,” Chang told a SXSW panel. “But no one has a good answer yet.”
Public awareness of sextortion and AI capabilities are the only antidote, experts agree.
When it comes to the extortionists, who the FBI believes are primarily based in Asia and Africa, victims should know the hackers will almost always send out the compromising material, no matter what you do or how much you pay. There is no keeping it secret.
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The best defense against deepfakes is to question any shocking material that elicits an emotional reaction. Did a billionaire pop star really make a professionally-produced porn video? Would President Joe Biden really urge people not to vote?
Conversely, people are declaring some authentic images are fake. When journalists photographed red blotches on former President Donald Trump’s hands, he falsely claimed they were generated by AI.
Every technical advancement creates an opportunity for criminals and liars. We all want to believe we’re too smart to fall victim to a hacker or a psychological operation. But remember, these folks spend every minute of their day dreaming up new ways to fool you, often utilizing the latest scientific research.
Professional journalists spend their lives separating good information from bad, as the doctored photos from the British royal family demonstrated. I hope that people will increasingly recognize the crucial services we provide, if someone hasn’t fooled them into rejecting our profession first.
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Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonhchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.
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