What to do if your child is being sextorted
Short answer
Do not pay, do not delete anything, and stop all contact with the offender without blocking them until screenshots are saved. Tell your child it is not their fault and they are not in trouble. Then use Take It Down, the free NCMEC service that removes the image from participating platforms without the image ever leaving your child's device, and report to the NCMEC CyberTipline. Paying does not end it, and deleting destroys the evidence needed to stop it.
This is the article nobody wants to need, so it is written to be read quickly by somebody who is frightened.
Financially motivated sextortion follows a consistent pattern: an approach from a fake account on a platform your child already uses, a friendly conversation, a request for an image, and then immediate demands for money with a threat to send the image to their contacts. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children recorded more than 50,000 reports of it in 2025, averaging 137 a day.
The escalation is fast and deliberate. Your child is not the first and the people doing this are running a process.
The first hour
Say the two things first
Before anything practical: tell them it is not their fault, and that they are not in trouble. Say both out loud even if you think it is obvious.
Offenders rely entirely on a child being too ashamed to tell anyone. That shame is the mechanism, and the single most useful thing you can do is remove it in the first minute. Whatever you feel about how this happened can wait.
Do not pay
Paying does not end it. It marks the account as one that pays, and demands typically continue and increase. This is the instinct almost every family has and it makes the situation worse.
Do not delete anything
The messages, the profile, the payment demands: all of it is evidence, and it is what platforms and investigators need to act. Screenshot the conversation, the account name and the profile page before doing anything else.
Stop replying, but do not block yet
Ending the conversation is right. Blocking immediately can wipe your access to the thread you have not screenshotted. Capture first, then block and report the account on the platform.
Getting the image taken down
Take It Down is a free NCMEC service and it is the practical step most parents do not know exists.
It removes or stops the sharing of nude, partially nude or sexually explicit images and videos taken of someone when they were under 18. It works on the image’s digital fingerprint — a hash — which is added to a secure list that participating platforms use to find and remove matches.
The part that matters when you are weighing whether to use it: the image itself never leaves the device. Only the hash is submitted. Your child is not uploading the photo to anybody.
One caution NCMEC gives: do not reshare the content on social media afterwards, because platforms may flag it and block the account.
Reporting it
Report to the NCMEC CyberTipline. This is what routes the case to the people who investigate these networks, and reporting matters even when it feels like nothing will come of your individual case, because these are organised operations and reports are how the pattern gets seen.
Report the account to the platform it happened on, separately.
If your child is in immediate distress, treat that as the emergency it is rather than waiting to resolve the online part first.
Why this happens to children who were told to be careful
Because it is not a failure of caution. The approach comes through an account that looks ordinary on a platform that is allowed, the conversation is friendly for as long as it needs to be, and the request arrives after trust has been built. Thorn’s research on financial sextortion describes the same escalation repeatedly.
No content filter operates inside a direct message thread with someone your child believes they know. This is the gap we wrote about in what parental controls actually block, and it is the reason the conversation matters more than the settings.
Before it happens
Three sentences worth saying to a child before any of this is relevant, and repeating occasionally:
An image request is a stop signal, every time, including from someone whose profile looks familiar.
If an image has already been sent, it is not over and it is not their fault.
They can tell you and keep their phone. If a child believes that telling you costs them the device, they will try to handle it alone — and NCMEC has said it is aware of at least three dozen teenage boys in the United States who died by suicide after being targeted in these schemes.
That last sentence is the reason the first two matter.