Published: Sat 3 Sep 2022
Written by: Jordan King, Metro
Offender: Don’t pay me and I’ll keep sharing (your nudes).
Offender: Block me if you want but I will share them to your contacts and school. So should I share them then?
Offender: Ok I’ll ruin your life then. Bye!
Teenage boy: You already sent it to people?
Offender: Cooperate and I will stop.
Teenage boy: I don’t even know what you want!!!!
Offender: Pay me. I’m serious. I can make big problems for you
Teenage boy: How much?
This disturbing conversation, between a child and an adult, is a typical example of what is happening to tens of thousands of children in the UK right now.
Manipulated and forced into taking sexual images and videos of themselves, these kids are unwittingly sending content to predators, who then blackmail their victims into paying them – or sharing further explicit material.
The groomers also distribute the images and videos as child sexual abuse material privately to paedophiles and to illegal ‘premium content’ websites.
It means that ‘one original incident’ gets turned into ‘1,000 different pictures on 1,000 different websites,’ according to Rosa, who works as an analyst for the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).
Read the full article at Metro.
The BBC’s been investigating the rise in child sex abuse material resulting from the rapid proliferation of open-source AI image generators.
