It was after midnight last November when Simon’s son burst into his parents’ bedroom and told them “something terrible’s happened”. Sixteen-year-old Nathan had been targeted by online criminals in a sextortion scam.
“We’ve had lots of conversations about this stuff with him over the years, but don’t think that your child is too sensible to do this,” said Simon.
The anonymous blackmailer was initially demanding £50 – messaging then repeatedly calling the frightened teenager – or he would share Nathan’s intimate image with all his contacts.
“He was very upset, I’d say hysterical at the start, but after an hour or so he’d calmed down. He said his main worry was what we would think, and once he’d established that we were on his side that was like a massive weight off his shoulders.”
Staying calm was the key, said Simon, looking back at how he and his wife handled the crisis. “She started Googling what to do and pretty quickly discovered Report Remove.”
Report Remove, which is run by the NSPCC and the Internet Watch Foundation, allows children to anonymously flag intimate images or videos of themselves that they have been tricked into sending to sextortion criminals. The service then turns those images into a “hash”, or digital fingerprint, which is shared with large tech platforms that can take the image down or prevent it from being uploaded.
“We’re only human,” said Simon, “and at the start we did say: ‘You should know better than this.’ But then what I tried to do was downplay it – and I suspect it’s different with daughters – but I said to my son: ‘It’s your standard dick pic, it’s nothing perverted or illegal that’s going to ruin your career.’ At worst if they send it it’s going to be very embarrassing but it’s not going to be life-wrecking, and that reassured him. I even suggested that he should write a standard message to send to all his contacts if they did share it.”
Fortunately for Nathan, the blackmailer moved on within a few hours, while the process of uploading the image to Report Remove was “psychologically important, it gave him something to hang on to”, said Simon.
“When I was talking to the officer from the child exploitation online protection unit, she told me probably the majority of teenagers have done this, which is both comforting and pretty terrible. It’s ridiculously common.”
Simon’s advice is to have “an open dialogue” with your children. “We have an agreement that we are able to look at their phone because that’s a basic part of parenting now. It’s not snooping, it’s not invasion of their privacy, it’s basic duty of care, but you need to have the agreement upfront.”
For young people, the biggest takeaway from Nathan’s experience is to get parents involved at the earliest possible stage, Simon added. “Don’t try to manage the situation yourself. Definitely don’t get drawn into a dialogue with the blackmailer.”
But teenagers themselves often say that, while they would want to get help from their parents if they were a victim of this increasingly common form of blackmail, they worry that they would not know how to help them or even know what sextortion is.
So says Lyndsay McDade, who has spent the past year working with young people, their parents and carers on how best to communicate the dangers of online blackmail.
Last November, a series of social media clips created by young people to inform their peers about sextortion was launched by Fearless Scotland, the youth service of the charity Crimestoppers, which McDade manages.
The teenagers who developed the online content said it was important to use language that young people could understand, keep the messages fast-paced and not scare them unnecessarily, in contrast to previous awareness-raising campaigns that “all looked like they’d been designed by old people trying to be young”.
Since then the youth ads have been viewed nearly 9m times on social media, and McDade said there was clearly appetite for more youth-focused information.
The second phase of the Fearless Scotland campaign is focusing on parents and carers. “It’s clear that parents are often confused by the technology their young people are using and don’t understand the different ways to keep their children safe online,” she said.
“Our main message is to keep talking to young people about this issue. Don’t have one conversation and assume that’s it. Make conversations about your online activity part of your daily life – it could simply be a funny video you’ve both seen or a new trend. Check out their followers. If they’ve got huge numbers, do they know these people in real life or are they strangers? Help your child to see that even if you don’t know the answer, you love them and whatever happens, you’re there for them and you’ll navigate it together.”
