If you are reading this because it is happening to you right now, start here: you are not the first, you are not in as much danger as it feels like, and there are specific things you can do in the next hour that will make this better. The person threatening you is counting on panic. This article is the opposite of panic.

If you are a parent reading this because of your kid, the same applies. Breathe, then keep reading.

How it usually starts

Someone attractive and friendly connects on Instagram, Snapchat, a gaming platform or a dating app. The conversation moves fast and turns flirtatious. They send an image first, which makes reciprocating feel normal. Sometimes they never needed one: they already have a photo of your face and can produce a fake.

Then the tone changes. They have your image, they have a list of your followers, your teammates, your coach, your family, and they will send it to all of them unless you pay. There is a countdown. The amount is usually small enough to seem payable.

Athletes and creators are targeted deliberately because the threat of exposure carries more weight when there is a scholarship, a sponsorship or an audience at stake. In 2025, the FBI and the NCAA issued a joint warning about sextortion schemes aimed at student-athletes. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 75,000 sextortion submissions that same year. This is an industry, run largely by organized groups overseas, working from scripts.

Why paying never ends it

The person on the other end is not a jilted individual with a grudge. They are working a queue. Paying confirms that you are someone who pays, and the demand returns, often within hours, often larger. There is no amount that buys the image back, because there is no image to buy back; it is a file that can be copied forever.

The threat is the product. Follow-through costs the attacker time and gains them nothing, which is why the threatened mass-send is far less common than the demand.

The exact steps

  1. Do not delete anything. Not the conversation, not the account, not the images. Every message is evidence, and the account details help investigators link cases. Deleting only makes it harder to stop.
  2. Screenshot everything. The profile, the username, the URL, every message including the threats and the payment demand, and any payment details they provided. Save them somewhere other than the device they were taken on.
  3. Stop engaging. Do not negotiate, do not plead, do not pay, do not send anything else. Do not reply at all. Block after you have captured the evidence, not before.
  4. Report in-app. Every major platform has a reporting path for sextortion and non-consensual imagery. Reporting gets the account removed and gives the platform data to find the operator’s other accounts.
  5. If the person in the image is under 18, use Take It Down. It is a free service from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at takeitdown.ncmec.org. It lets you create a digital fingerprint of the image from your own device, without uploading the image itself, and participating platforms use that fingerprint to find and remove copies. Also report to NCMEC’s CyberTipline. For adults, StopNCII.org operates on the same principle.
  6. Report to the FBI at ic3.gov, or to your local FBI field office. Include the screenshots. Sextortion of a minor is a federal crime and the FBI treats it as such.
  7. Lock the accounts. Set profiles to private temporarily, review who can message you, and change passwords if the attacker might have access.
  8. Tell one trusted adult or teammate. Isolation is what the attacker needs. The moment someone else knows, the leverage drops.

How to talk to a teenager about it

Teenagers do not tell their parents because they expect to be punished for the thing that started it. The attacker exploits exactly that. The most protective thing you can do, ideally before anything happens, is remove the punishment from the equation.

Say it plainly: if anyone ever threatens you with a picture, come to me, and you will not be in trouble, no matter what the picture is. Then mean it. The sequence that ends badly is almost always a kid who handled it alone for days.

If it has already happened, lead with the fact that it is a crime done to them by a professional, that it happens to a staggering number of people, and that it is fixable. Then do the steps above together. Do not take the phone away; that reads as punishment and removes your visibility into whether contact continues.

If your child expresses any thought of self-harm, treat that as the emergency, ahead of everything else on this page.

What a security firm actually does

People assume we hack the attacker or make the image disappear. We do neither, and anyone who promises either should be avoided. What we actually do:

  • Take over the evidence capture and the reporting so the victim does not have to keep looking at it.
  • Get the platform reports escalated through trust-and-safety contacts rather than the public form.
  • Submit hashes through Take It Down or StopNCII and monitor for the image surfacing anywhere.
  • Lock down the victim’s accounts and the accounts of the family and teammates who were named as targets.
  • Prepare the FBI report and coordinate with law enforcement and, where needed, the school or team.
  • Draft the short statement to use if the image does get sent to anyone, so the response is calm and ready.

Where ShutOut comes in

We work sextortion cases for athletes, creators and families quietly and quickly, from the first message through the law enforcement report and the account lockdown that follows. If it is happening right now, do the steps above tonight, then call us in the morning. If it has not happened yet, the conversation with your teenager is the best prevention there is.