A stranger can take one ordinary photo of your child and turn it into an explicit image in less than a minute. Then the messages start. Police call this sextortion — blackmail with a sexual picture — and it is growing fast.
What is actually going on
The tool behind it is often called a “nudify” app. You give it a normal photo of someone in clothes, and it hands back a fake image of the same face without them. It needs almost nothing to work with: one clear picture of a face is enough, and those pictures are everywhere — a profile photo, a school yearbook, a screenshot from a video call.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a British charity that hunts illegal images of children online and counts what it finds. In the first six months of 2026 its analysts assessed 6,310 AI-made images that broke the law — already 40% more than in the whole of 2025, when they found 4,512. Most of the pictures showed girls, and most showed children aged seven to thirteen.
Videos are growing faster still. In 2024 the IWF found 13 AI-made videos of child abuse. In 2025 it found 3,440, and two thirds of them were in the most serious legal category.
Then comes a demand for money
The blackmail usually follows the same script. A stranger makes contact first, often pretending to be someone your child’s age, and acts friendly. Once the conversation is going, they send the fake image and a demand.
Some count down in messages: five, four, three, two, one. Others claim the picture has already gone out to friends and family, and that paying is the only way to stop it. Police say that is a deliberate lie. It is built to convince the victim that the damage is done, because someone who believes it is too late will pay.
The scale is enormous. In the United States, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received an average of 137 reports a day of blackmail driven by money in 2025 — 37% more than the year before. Reports involving AI-made abuse images rose from 4,700 in 2023 to more than 400,000 in 2025.
Why it matters to you
Most victims are teenagers with phones, and any teenager with a phone can be reached this way. The harder problem is that they often say nothing.
The United States Secret Service published the story of a 16-year-old girl who was sent a fake image of herself by someone she had been chatting with. She felt humiliated. She did not go to her parents; she told her twin sister, who had to push her to speak to their father.
That silence is the criminal’s most useful tool. Blackmail works by convincing the victim that they are the one who did something wrong — even when the picture was made without them ever taking it.
What you can actually do
- Have the conversation before anything happens. Say it out loud: if a picture like this ever turns up, I will not be angry with you, and it is not your fault.
- Never pay. Paying does not buy silence. It tells the criminal that you are a person who pays.
- Do not delete anything yet. Take screenshots of the messages, the account name and the demand first, then block and report.
- Report it twice. Report the account inside the app, and report the crime to the police. In Germany you can do that online through your state’s Onlinewache, the police station on the internet.
- Close the doors. Make your child’s accounts private, check who can see their photos, and think twice about posting pictures of children where anyone can find them.
- Get help for the person, not only for the account. Tell the school, a counsellor or a youth helpline, and keep checking in.
Common misunderstandings
Myth: “If she never sent a photo, there is nothing to worry about.”
That is exactly what changed. The point of these tools is that no photo has to be sent. A normal picture of a face is enough to produce the fake, so the victim is blackmailed over an image they never posed for.
Myth: “Paying will make it stop.”
Police and child protection organisations give the same advice, and it is the opposite one. Paying confirms that this is a family that pays, and the demands usually come back. There is also no way to check that anything was really deleted.
Myth: “My child would tell me.”
Shame gets in the way, and that is not a sign of a bad relationship. The 16-year-old in the Secret Service report told her sister, not her parents. Families who hear about it early are usually the ones who had already said, out loud, that they would not be angry.
What to watch for next
Expect the image tools to keep getting easier to use, and this crime to keep spreading, because it costs the criminal almost nothing. Watch for the pattern rather than the technology: a new online “friend” who is unusually interested in your child’s photos, a sudden push to move the chat to another app, and a teenager who goes quiet or starts hiding their phone.
In the UK, a free service called Report Remove lets a young person report an image themselves and have it blocked from being shared again. Find out what the equivalent is where you live, and keep the number at hand before you need it.
The one thing to remember
A fake explicit photo of your child is not something they did. It is something that was done to them. Say that out loud, before anything happens, and you have already given them the reason to speak to you instead of paying.
Image credit: “Teen with Smartphone Lying in Bed” by Boris Hamer, published on Pexels and used under the Pexels License, which allows free use without attribution.