Almost 1 in 6 Australians have faced sextortion threats. If you're reading this because it's happening to you right now, skip ahead to the section "What to do in the first hour". The short version: don't pay, don't send more, save the evidence, and report it. You are not the one who did something wrong here.
It usually starts one of two ways.
An ex is angry you're in a new relationship, and you receive a text: "If you don't meet me, I'll show them our videos."
Or you're bored, a bit lonely, and someone pops up on Snapchat or Instagram and starts to chat. There's mutual attraction, and before you know it, nudes are exchanged. Then the tone flips: pay $500 or the images go to your family, your followers, your employer.
Both are sextortion. Both are crimes. And both have a playbook for response that works far better than panic, payment, or silence.
What sextortion actually is
Sextortion is threatening to release a person's intimate images or video without consent, to extract money, more intimate images, or unwanted sexual or other acts. Under Australian law it's a form of abuse built on blackmail, and it covers real images, altered images, and AI-generated deepfakes. "Intimate" is defined broadly: bare genitals or genitals covered by underwear, undressing, using the toilet, showering, bathing, or engaging in a sexual act.
Perpetrators are not one type of person. Intimate partners, ex-partners, friends, family members, acquaintances, and complete strangers all show up in the data. The fastest-growing category is organised offshore crime: scam networks running thousands of fake profiles, working victims through scripted conversations at industrial scale, alongside romance scams, fake job ads, and phishing.
Two related patterns are worth distinguishing, because the response differs:
Image-based abuse from a known person (often called revenge porn) is distribution or threats from someone you know, driven by spite rather than money. The legal pathways are stronger here because the perpetrator is identifiable and in Australia.
Romance scams run longer. The target believes the relationship is real, and the extraction happens through fake emergencies, investment schemes, or eventually sextortion. The person on the other end was never real.
What to do in the first hour
This is the sequence. It's the same advice eSafety, the AFP, and every platform's safety team give, and it works.
1. Do not pay. Paying doesn't make it stop. The data on this is unambiguous: extortionists who get paid come back with new demands, because you've proven you'll pay. Victims who don't pay are usually dropped within days, because offshore operators work volume and move on to the next target. If you already paid, don't pay again, and don't be ashamed; contact your bank immediately, because transfers can sometimes be frozen or traced.
2. Stop responding, but don't delete anything. Don't argue, don't negotiate, don't beg. Just stop. And resist the instinct to delete the conversation in disgust: the chat, the account names, and the threats are your evidence.
3. Screenshot everything. The profile, the messages, the threats, the payment demands, any usernames and URLs. Capture them before the scammer deletes the account, which they often do once a victim stops engaging.
4. Report it to the platform. Every major platform (Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, X, Reddit) has a dedicated reporting pathway for intimate-image threats, and they remove accounts for it. This also creates a paper trail.
5. Report it to eSafety and police. The eSafety Commissioner is Australia's regulator for image-based abuse, with legal powers to order platforms to remove content fast. It's free and confidential. For the criminal side, report via ReportCyber; threats to share intimate images are criminal offences in every Australian state and territory. If there is any threat to physical safety, call 000.
6. Hash the images with StopNCII. StopNCII.org creates a digital fingerprint of the image on your own device (the image itself never leaves your phone) and participating platforms, including Meta, TikTok, Bumble, and Reddit, block matching uploads automatically. It works for threats too, before anything has been shared.
Then tell someone. A third of victims of online abuse tell no one at all, and that isolation is exactly what the threat relies on. One conversation with a friend, family member, or counsellor changes how survivable this feels. Lifeline is on 13 11 14 around the clock if it's heavy.
If you're under 18, or it's your child
Everything above applies, with three additions, and one thing that matters more than all of it: this is a crime committed against you, not a mistake you'll be punished for.
First, eSafety prioritises reports involving under-18s, and the removal powers are stronger. Report at esafety.gov.au/report even if you're embarrassed; the people reading these reports handle hundreds of them and will not judge you.
Second, Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 is free, confidential, and available 24/7 by phone or webchat for anyone aged 5 to 25. They deal with sextortion every single day.
Third, tell a trusted adult, even though it feels impossible. The tragic cases in this space share one feature: the victim felt they couldn't tell anyone. Parents: if your child comes to you with this, the single most protective thing you can do is stay calm and make it clear they're not in trouble.
ORMA's commercial services are for adults 18 and over, so for under-18 matters the free pathways above are not just the right first step, they're the whole answer, and they're faster than anything paid.
The numbers, because this is not rare
The scale surprises everyone who looks at it.
It's far more common than you think. Australian research found 18.8% of men and 13.1% of women in Australia have been threatened with sextortion. Men, younger people, and LGBTQ+ respondents report higher rates of both victimisation and perpetration (RMIT and Google, ten-country study, 2024).
Reports are climbing fast. eSafety recorded a 283% increase in sexual extortion reports from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023, with around 70% of reports coming from 18-to-24-year-olds and roughly 90% from males (eSafety, 2023). Only an estimated one in ten victims report at all, so the real volume is far larger.
Deepfakes have changed the threat. Researchers tracking synthetic intimate-imagery sites counted more than 24 million unique visitors to 34 such sites in a single month, and a 2,000% increase in referral spam for "nudify" services since the start of 2023 (Graphika, 2023). eSafety told a Senate committee that explicit deepfakes have increased online by as much as 550% year on year since 2019 (eSafety, 2024). The practical meaning: you no longer need to have taken an intimate image to be extorted with one.
The harm is real and mostly silent. In the Australian Institute of Criminology's cybercrime survey, around one in five victims of online abuse and harassment said their health was affected, and more than a third told no one, not even family or friends (AIC, 2023). The downstream costs show up everywhere: sleep, work, trust, finances, relationships.
Three cases that show the pattern
The standard scam, survived. Charlie, 21, met "Amelia" on Snapchat. Minutes after he sent images, the threats started: 500 pounds or the images go to his Instagram followers. His payment failed to process, which turned out to be luck; the scammers shared the images with a handful of people and moved on. A friend of his paid 1,500 pounds and the images were spread anyway (reported publicly, 2023). Paying doesn't buy safety. It buys a price list with your name on it.
The worst outcome. Rohan Cosgriff was 17 when a Snapchat conversation with "Christine" turned into a demand, and the threat to distribute came less than an hour before he took his own life, barely 24 hours after the first message. He was, by every account, a bright, kind young man with nothing wrong in his life except a scammer's script (reported publicly, 2024). His family tells his story publicly so that other young people hear the one thing he didn't: this is survivable, and telling someone is the way through. If this case is close to home, Lifeline is 13 11 14.
The industrial scale. In 2024 Meta removed about 63,000 Instagram accounts running financial sextortion, largely operated from Nigeria by the loose network known as Yahoo Boys, along with 1,300 Facebook accounts and 5,700 groups that were selling scam scripts and tips (reported publicly, 2024). The person threatening you is almost certainly not a person who knows you. They're a desk in a scam operation, working a queue.
The law, briefly
Threatening to record or distribute an intimate image without consent is a criminal offence under state and territory law across Australia, alongside blackmail and stalking offences. At the federal level, the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Act 2024 made non-consensual sharing of sexual material, including AI-generated and altered material, a federal crime carrying up to six years' imprisonment, with aggravated penalties for creators who share.
The honest caveat: prosecution is hard when the perpetrator is offshore, which most financial sextortion operators are. That's not a reason to skip the police report (reports drive platform enforcement, account takedowns, and occasionally international action), but it is the reason the practical fight is about removal, containment, and visibility rather than waiting for a courtroom. The civil and regulatory pathway through eSafety, which doesn't care where the offender sits because its orders bind the platforms, is usually the most effective lever; the eSafety takedown process explainer covers how it works.
After the emergency: cleaning up what's left
For most people who follow the playbook above, the threat collapses within days. What sometimes remains is residue: content that reached smaller sites before takedowns landed, reposts and screenshots, accounts impersonating you, or search results that keep an episode visible long after it's resolved.
That aftermath is where ORMA works, for adults, alongside the official channels and never instead of them. We coordinate platform takedown requests across the surfaces eSafety notices don't reach, monitor for re-uploads, lock down the online footprint that gave the scam its leverage, and run search-side suppression where residual content ranks against your name. Our extortion and blackmail page covers the engagement model, and the free assessment will tell you honestly if the free pathways already have it covered, which is the case about a third of the time.
If you take one thing from this article: the threat is designed to make you feel alone, ashamed, and out of options. You are none of those things. Don't pay. Save the evidence. Report it. Tell someone. The system for dealing with this is better than most people know, and it's mostly free.