Australia’s online safety regulator received more than 3,300 reports of sexual extortion, aka ‘sextortion’ last year, with young men the most targeted group.

Experts warn this crime is growing rapidly in scale and sophistication, partly due to generative AI.

eSafety is now “turning the tables” on scammers by using AI itself for a new campaign. I spoke to eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to learn more about this new data and educational campaign.

TDA: How would you describe sexual extortion or 'sextortion' to someone who's never heard of it before?

Inman Grant: Sexual extortion is a form of online blackmail where someone threatens to share a nude or a sexual image or video of you unless you give in to their demands.

This is a little bit scary, but there are two kinds of sexual extortion that we're seeing. One is called sadistic sexual extortion, and it tends to target young girls, often for more sexualised content. [Then there's] financial sexual extortion, and a lot of this is really lucrative for organised criminal gangs. A lot of them are based overseas, and they tend to target young men between the ages of 16 and 24, and it's almost always for money.

TDA: In 2025, eSafety received more than 3,300 reports of sexual extortion. 86% of those were from men, and around half of total complaints were from men aged between 18 to 24. How has the profile of this crime shifted in recent years?

Inman Grant: We've really seen a huge spike in this kind of harm type over the past five years. We first started seeing this over COVID, and the target was generally international students. Often international students are from means. They're paying full tuition. They may not understand the dating conventions here in Australia. They're away from home. Everything was being done online, so that's when we started to see it. The blackmailers or the overseas criminals started to realise… this is a pretty ingenious way to target young men who might want to take a risk. You know, there's a hot blonde who's reached out to you and seems to know your friends, and people from an adjacent school. Scammers do their research in advance.

TDA: In many cases, sextortionists are overseas, as you have flagged. What kind of tactics have you seen them use to make themselves appear local and legitimate?

Inman Grant: What we're seeing that's really alarming is that, because criminals don't have compliance rules, they tend to be early adopters of advanced technologies. So we're starting to see more 'vishing', voice cloning to use phishing-type social engineering scams. They're also using deep fake technologies where they can superimpose a false face on their own, 'face-swapping', and it looks like you're conversing with a woman or another person that you're not conversing with. This is how convincing the technology is.

With current technologies improving, all they need is 10 seconds of your voice to be able to create a voice map [for voice cloning]. They can even use technologies now to give a person who may be from elsewhere an Australian accent.

TDA: eSafety has launched a new campaign called ‘If Sextortionists Were Honest’. It gives us a glimpse into these generative AI videos that show how a scammer lures someone in. A lot of people might find this campaign quite confronting, seeing AI used in this way by a government agency. How did you land on that approach?

Inman Grant: The whole idea with this was to make it realistic enough that people would question [it], and this is exactly what we want young people to do. We want them questioning everything. You know, why would this beautiful young person come out of the blue and just start talking to you and within five minutes ask you to take off your clothes? We want to hone those critical reasoning skills, but also give them some pointers about what to do and what not to do.

We've seen some of the criminal manifestos, and one of the key tactics is once the nude imagery or videos are handed over, the tone changes immediately. It becomes aggressive, and one of the tactics is to isolate the young person, to use fear and shame and guilt and terminology like, "I have control. I'm going to ruin your life if you don't pay me."

The key message is: All you need to do to remember is three things. Report, block, and get support. You can report to the platform itself. If intimate imagery or the threat to share is live, you can report to eSafety at esafety.gov.au. We have an image-based abuse scheme. I have a 98% success rate in terms of getting that content taken down.

But the most important thing is to get support. That common tactic of isolating a person is to make them panic so that they will pay. And what we've also seen is once you pay, they know that you're willing to pay, and they will keep coming back. So just be sure that you're blocking, you're taking screenshots, you're collecting evidence, not only of the account it came from, but what kind of payment mechanisms are they asking you to use.

TDA: Is the scale of the problem much bigger than that 3,300 figure suggests?

Inman Grant: Absolutely. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We did some work with the Australian Institute of Criminology last year, and we found that one in 10 people aged 16 to 18 were being targeted… because when you're 18, you're more likely to have income and be working, but you're still taking risks. It's a really awkward time because you're technically an adult. So parents may stop having those conversations with you. You don't have the pastoral care or the support of the school environment. So it's a really, really vulnerable time for young people who might not feel like they can or should reach out to anyone.

TDA: What would you say to a young person who feels too ashamed or frightened to come forward?

Inman Grant: I would say, they can go to eSafety. Go to Kids Helpline if you're 25 or under. Go to Lifeline, talk to someone, call a friend, knock on your parents' door. We know that people are in distress, and we speak to them with compassion. This isn't about judgment or anything that any young person has done wrong. I just reinforce that they are the victims, and just remember to report, block, and get support wherever you can find it.

If today’s deep dive raised any issues for you, help is available on 1800 Respect (1800 737 732). You can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 for 24/7 crisis support. For more information on sextortion, head to the eSafety website here.

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