Financial Sextortion

Parents, are you familiar with the term financial sextortion? If not, you need to not only become aware, but to warn your teens about the growing number of instances of financial sextortion. Here’s how it works. Your teen is spending time with someone else on a social media platform when that person sends a message asking the teen to snap a picture of himself or herself naked while also showing their face in the picture. All along, the teen has been thinking that they’ve been talking and flirting with a peer, usually of the opposite sex. Your teen snaps the photo and sends it, just as they were asked to do. Suddenly, the other person, who many times had been chatting it up for days and even weeks, demands money be electronically transferred, or else they will make the photo go public to family and friends. Officials at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children say that financial sextortion has exploded in recent years. Parents, sexting of any type is wrong and dangerous.