Urgent Action
Someone is threatening to share private photos of you
Sextortion is almost always a numbers game run from a script. What to do, what not to do, and why the threat is usually not carried out.
If this is happening to you right now: you are not the first person this has happened to today, and the person doing it is very unlikely to be interested in you personally.
What to do now
Stop replying
Every reply confirms a live target. Silence is genuinely the strongest move available to you.
Do not pay anything
People who pay are put on a list and contacted again. People who go quiet are usually abandoned within a day or two.
Screenshot everything before you block
Profile, username, the full conversation, the threats, and any payment details or wallet addresses. You will need this to report, and the account will be deleted.
Lock down your social accounts
Set them to private, or deactivate them for a few days. Deactivate rather than delete, so your evidence survives. If they cannot see your profile they cannot easily reach your contacts.
Report the account to the platform
Every major platform has a specific category for this. Reported accounts get removed, which takes away the account they were going to send from.
Report it to the police or your national cybercrime body
This is a crime, and a serious one. A report number also helps if anything is ever published.
Pre-emptively block the images
See the section below on how this works. It can stop an image being uploaded to major platforms before anyone tries.
Why they usually do not send it
It is worth understanding the business you have been caught up in, because it changes how frightening it feels.
This is done at volume, from a script, to hundreds of people at once. The threat is the entire product. Actually sending the material takes effort, creates evidence, and destroys the only leverage they hold, which is your fear that they might. Once it is sent, there is no reason for you to pay anything, ever.
That is not a guarantee, and nobody honest can give you one. But the overwhelming pattern is that people who stop responding are dropped within a day or two, and nothing is ever sent.
Blocking the images before anyone can post them
There is a free service for this. StopNCII.org generates a digital fingerprint, called a hash, from an image or video on your own device, and shares only that fingerprint with participating platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit. If anyone tries to upload something matching it, the upload is stopped.
The important detail: the image itself never leaves your device and is never uploaded to anyone. Only the fingerprint is shared, and a fingerprint cannot be turned back into a picture. You do not have to hand your material to a stranger to be protected from it.
Telling someone
The threat that makes this work is exposure to the people you care about. It loses most of its power the moment one of those people already knows.
You do not owe anyone the details. "Someone is trying to blackmail me with private photos and I am dealing with it" is a complete sentence. Telling one person you trust, before anyone else hears anything, changes the whole balance of the situation.
They have a list of my friends and family. Does that mean they hacked my account?
Usually not. On most platforms a follower or friend list is visible to anyone who can see your profile, so all they needed was to look. Screenshotting it and showing you is a standard part of the script, because it makes the threat feel specific and researched when it is neither. Setting your account to private removes that access.
Should I delete my accounts?
Deactivate rather than delete. Deactivating hides your profile immediately, which is what actually protects you, while keeping your account and its evidence intact so you can reactivate later and support a report. Deleting can permanently destroy the conversation you may need.
What if they send it anyway?
It would be a very bad day, and it would not be the end of your life, your job, or your relationships. Report it to the platform immediately, because non-consensual intimate imagery is removed under every major platform's rules and removal is usually fast. Keep your evidence and give it to the police. In many countries sharing this material is a criminal offence in itself. And the people who matter will care about what was done to you, not about the images.
One thing to hold on to. You have not done anything wrong. Sharing something intimate with someone you believed you could trust is an ordinary human thing to do. The person who broke that trust and turned it into a threat is the only one at fault here.
This happened to them too
First-hand accounts from people who went through the same thing.
My friend found a Facebook page full of AI deepfakes of her
“last night, i woke up to my friend spam calling me, and when i answered, i immediately heard sobs from the other side.…”
A video call on Snapchat became a $500 blackmail demand
“i’m literally shaking right now. i met this girl on bumble and we moved to snapchat and things got... heated. we did a…”