The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network today issued a notice to help financial institutions detect and disrupt a financially motivated type of extortion in which victims are coerced into sending explicit images of themselves.
Financially motivated “sextortion” occurs when perpetrators, using fake personas, coerce victims to create and send sexually explicit images or videos of themselves, only to threaten to release the material to the victims’ friends and family unless the victims provide payment, FinCEN said. The agency noted the FBI last year received nearly 55,000 reports of crimes related to sextortion and extortion, with financial losses totaling $33.5 million, a 59% increase in the number of reports received in 2023. Minors — especially boys between the ages of 14 and 17 — “are a particularly vulnerable population.”
“Financially motivated sextortion schemes have devastating effects on victims and their families,” FinCEN Director Andrea Gacki said. “These schemes can target anyone and often seek to exploit victims’ feelings of helplessness and embarrassment for financial gain. This notice underscores the importance of suspicious activity reporting to support law enforcement investigations into these abusive schemes and protect Americans from this gross abuse of the U.S. financial system.”
