Officials Say Online ‘Sextortion’ of Teens on the Rise
This is a good article describing a new trend of Child Predators.
By Charles Wilson, The Associated Press, Published Saturday, August 14, 2010 at 2:51 PM
INDIANAPOLIS — The nightmare began with a party: three teenagers with a webcam, visiting an Internet chat room and yielding to requests to flash their breasts.
A week later, one of the girls, a 17-year-old from Indiana, started getting threatening e-mails. A stranger said he had captured her image on the webcam and would post the pictures to her MySpace friends unless she posed for more explicit pictures and videos for him. At least twice, the teen did what her blackmailer demanded. Finally, police and federal authorities became involved and indicted a 19-year-old Maryland man in June on charges of sexual exploitation.
One federal affidavit includes a special term for the crime: “sextortion.”
Federal prosecutors and child-safety advocates say they’re seeing an increase in such cases of online-sexual extortion. They say teens who text nude cellphone photos of themselves or show off their bodies on the Internet are being contacted by pornographers who threaten to expose their behavior to friends and family unless they pose for more explicit porn, creating a cycle of exploitation.
The cases have prompted law-enforcement officials and advocates to caution teens. Privacy is nonexistent on the Internet, and once indiscretions appear online, they are virtually impossible to take back.
Teens can be more vulnerable to blackmail because they’re easy to intimidate and embarrassed to seek help. And the extortionists are often willing to make good on their threats, said Steve DeBrota, an assistant U.S. attorney in Indianapolis who has been involved in sextortion investigations.
