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Heather knew there have been grownups on the net whom preyed on children, and she frequently warned her very own four young ones in regards to the problems of speaking with strangers online. Yet the 37-year-old married mother from Phoenix never thought she would ever fall target to an increasing Internet crime called sextortion.
The Federal Bureau of research (FBI) categorizes sextortion as a type of online blackmail where explicit pictures are utilized to extort extra pictures, intimate favors, and quite often money from victims. It can include hacking in to a target’s computer or “catfishing” — where predators lure naive victims into online relationships and coerce them into sharing photos that are nude videos. A 2016 report through the Brookings Institute unearthed that sextortion is from the increase, and noted that is not ”a matter of playful consensual sexting,” but instead ”a kind of intimate exploitation, coercion and physical violence.”