Sextortion

In 2015, a Brookings paper identified 78 perpetrators of sextortion. I found many more—both alleged perpetrators and victims’ accounts.

Longtime Lawfare readers may be familiar with the work we have published on “sextortion”—a form of remote sexual violence that usually involves a perpetrator obtaining explicit images or video of a victim and using that material for blackmail, often to produce further sexual material or money. Editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and I, along with colleagues Cody Poplin and Clara Spera, did a fair bit of research on the matter a few years ago.

Shortly after we released our sextortion reports back in May, Sen. Barbara Boxer wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch seeking data on the scope and magnitude of the problem: "court records show that some of these cyber-criminals have blackmailed hundreds of different victims online.

As Ben noted last week, Janis Wolak and David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center recently released a new report on sextortion, funded by Thorn. I have now read it carefully.