Instagram launched new safety features to try and protect teens against sextortion. Sextortion is a crime when someone convinces a teen to send sexually explicit images or videos and then threatens to release them to friends, family and followers if the person in the pictures does not send money or gift cards.
"These are coordinated criminal scammers. They're very, very aggressive and very good about pressuring people into sending images. They start out aggressive, and they move quickly into pressuring someone into sending images, and then they quickly move into trying to move you off of the platform where they found you onto a different platform," explained Ravi Sinha head of Child Safety Policy at Meta, which owns Instagram.
Sinha said Instagram is launching these new safety features to combat sextortion and help teens spot and avoid sextortion scams.
"One of the ways in which these scams often manifest is someone reaches out to you, someone you don't know, and pretends to be a classmate or someone from the next school or next town over. When, in fact, they're someone from all the way across the world," Sinha said.
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If that happens now, Instagram will prompt the user with a warning letting the teen know they're chatting with someone from a different country.
Another new safety feature involves Instagram blocking the ability of people to screenshot or record images that are sent as view once in chat; another feature gives users the ability to hide follower lists.
"What we know is that sextortion scammers use these follower lists to coerce and pressure their targets. They say essentially that I'm going to share these images with people in your follower list. So we're making sure that potentially scammy accounts can't even see these follower lists." Sinha said.
According to the FBI, teen victims targeted are often males between the ages of 14-17. Over a six-month period, the agency said it had a 20% increase in reporting of financially motivated sextortion cases, crimes that the FBI said can lead victims to self-harm or even to suicide.
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"One of the things that these scammers really rely on is the shame and embarrassment that teens may feel about having shared an intimate image, and so, as a parent, it's really important that you create an environment that is not based on shame," Sinha said.
If your teen or you get caught in a sextortion scam, authorities advise you stop all communication and not pay the money -- as it won't help. Instead, report it to local police and through the social media platform where it's happening.