In the last few months, I have read quite a few stories of kids who have been blackmailed after sending explicit pictures of themselves to catfish accounts. I read one story just yesterday about a 14 year old boy who killed himself just three hours after getting the blackmail message. And then today, there happened to be a story in the Finnish news that so far this year, the police have been contacted for 101 such cases, with 94% of them being boys. I suspect though, that the number is far higher. And likely, there are more girls also.
What is interesting though, is that these same kids also consider themselves digital natives, raised on screens, gods of the internet. Yet, obviously, a lot of them are not quite as skilled as they believe themselves to be, which is natural, because they are kids. But they are kids that have been exposed to a lot of the worst sides of the internet too, desensitised to violence and sexual content, and building personal desires that would have made a worldly adult blush, just a few short decades ago.
Deviants are everywhere.
Which makes them mainstream, not deviants. Average behaviours have changed and a lot of what used to be considered fringe behaviour, is now mainstream. And the mainstream is put in front of the eyes of children, behind the privacy of their screens, in the privacy of their rooms, with no one to help them understand what they are seeing. Is it any wonder that these digital natives are naturally quite open to sending explicit photos of themselves to strangers online, when they think they can get a bit of attention from someone they find attractive?
They are kids. They haven't learned self-control, especially in the current environment they have been raised in, nor do they have good judgement, and they have very little understanding of the consequences and ramifications of their actions. Regardless of whether they have been raised on screens and the internet, they just aren't equipped to make good decisions, and they do not fully comprehend how they are going to feel when things go wrong. And when they put so much of their self-worth into their digital persona and care so much about what their peers think of them, they are an easy target for exactly this kind of blackmail.
The blackmailers should be ashamed.
But they aren't, because as has been proven time and time again, if there is money to be made, no matter how disgusting or heinous the activity, there will be someone willing to do it. Rooms filled with people willing to do it. Organised groups willing to force people to do it. They don't care that children are committing suicide over these things, it is just collateral damage, much like civilians dying in a warzone. As long as there is profits to be made, the cost of death is acceptable.
And they aren't going to stop.
The only way to stop an incentivised activity, is to disincentivise it. Since the majority of the tracking leads back to poor countries with shaky legal systems, the disincentive can really only come through making it unprofitable, by having so few people tricked into these kinds of scams, that there is no money to keep them operating. While they use some sophisticated methods, every child should know that they shouldn't be sending explicit images to people on the internet. Let alone people they have never even met in real life.
Isn't that a pretty basic rule?
There is another way to stop it of course. And that is to make the behaviour so prolific, so accepted, that children don't care if there are sexually explicit images of them plastered all over the internet. And unfortunately, I think that this is more the direction we are heading, which is why there are children today who "can't wait" to turn eighteen so they can go onto sites like OnlyFans. And we have a thousand teenage boys lining up to bang a pornstar on camera, one after the other.
What have we done to humanity...
Education might be key, but we also have to remember that children are children and no matter how many times they are told, many are just not going to listen. They think they know better than those older than them, because that is part of being a child. However, even though children haven't changed at their core, the risks aren't the same as they once were, and the costs can be much higher.
Their whole identity is built around the global internet, which means one mistake and the whole world knows. And even if no one cares, the feeling of that immature individual is that everyone knows and they will never live it down. That their mistake will live with them and be part of who they are forever. And for some, it is impossible to imagine a happy life with that hanging over their head, so they end their lives.
I don't believe that just because children have been raised on screens, that they innately know how to handle themselves on the internet. I don't believe they are more capable and actually think they are more gullible than previous generations, because they have socialised so much less. They haven't learnt to read the warning signs, so fall into all kinds of situations they don't actually want to be in.
Will they learn, or just keep giving in to their nature?
Taraz
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I read about how Cosa Nostra was born, and the things they did just to make money, no matter the limits. In this case is the same shit. You said it : Those kids are just a few victims of the business, colateral damage.
Btw, it is a big percentage of boys been blackmailed. In my mind girls are more in the stats. Girls are stronger than boys in this topic, or just been dead is the same that to live forever traumatized
I think more girls would be there too, but perhaps they are either more wary, or more likely to pay the ransom.
I think girls have been more conditioned by their parents and society to be far more careful about nudity, but I imagine parents of boys rarely talk about it.
Maybe, but I also think that girls would be less likely to report it. Like a lot of rapes go unreported.
That's true, we have too many institutions, including the law, that protects the perpetrators above their victims.
They're kids, they need to be protected by their adults. You wouldn't let a child near a car or a firearm unless you could provide a safe education, and we need to be treating digital technology as equally as dangerous. Especially with the gamblification of everything.
Predators spend all their time, energy and resources perpetrating their scams. I'm sure adults fall for it just as much as kids do, the profitability of pig butchering scams is off the charts.
The solution is education; both for kids and adults alike. We all need dramatically more education in this space... both with what to watch out for, but also what to do when we're inevitably scammed - especially with GenAI making more convincing deep fakes.
Don't blame the kids, it's not their fault. The fault lies squarely on parents, teachers and law enforcement... as it would with any other crime.
The challenge is, many adults are conditioned these days too. Most of my friends don't truly admit the dangers, because it is more convenient not to.
I don't think I blamed the kids.
Also, on a related side note - wouldn't this be a place for AI? For instance for basic phishing scams to reduce profitability, an AI agent could identify and then engage with the scammer, leading them on and on but ultimately getting nowhere. Same for some of this explicit image phishing on kids phones - "if it looks explicit" do not share and add warning after warning.
Oh sorry, because you called them deviant natives and asked at the end if they'll ever learn, I thought you were putting the blame on the kids who got scammed.
I think your friends don't admit the dangers because of a lack of education... they may truly not understand just how dangerous it all is... I have to imagine they want to protect their kids however possible.
Yeah, this would be a great case for GenAI - although it'd pretty much be an arms race as the scammers also develop GenAI to defeat the protecting GenAI... until we all get exhausted and log off forever.
No. As said, their deviant behaviour is now mainstream behaviour. and if they will ever learn is a fair question - as you said, it is about education and most have had at least some education on this, but haven't learned. At least in Finland, digital education is part of the curriculum - they obviously haven't learned yet.
Even the parents who feed their kids junk food daily, say they want the best for their kids.
It is an arms race anyway. Who can create general intelligence and monopolise the entire market first.
It's truly hard to know how far away artificial general intelligence is, because that's the development that's all happening behind closed doors. It might already exist, it might be decades away or it might truly be impossible - who knows?
And on a side note - if thirty years ago one of your friends said that they give explicit photos of themselves to random people in the street, what would you have thought? :D
Did you ever see People magazine in Australia? It was super trashy and had a section where women could send in their nudes to be published.
I do think it's important to say that these scammers are grooming both kids and adults over weeks, months, years to get those photos. They're experts at slowly building trust... I genuinely think both you and I would fall for it too if we were single - it's what they do all day every day.
It's crazy just how quickly stuff like this can spiral and from kids that would never think could fall for it. It's sad that they want that attention and affirmation so badly that they think this is the route to take and they do it so willingly. It just magnifies the level of sick the people who force them to do it are. What a worthless piece of trash you would have to be to do that to a kid.
Their world seems to centre around getting attention these days. Harvard students "want to be an influencer" - not a business leader these days.
100% agree. But look at places like Thailand where people sell children to pedos. If there is a market, if there is money to be made, someone will do it.
Yeah, it's all going to crap! Though the stuff in Thailand has probably been happening for generations.
That's the problem today. People can easily sell their consciences so far there's some sort of benefit, especially monetary benefit.
This also applies to the social media owners themselves, accounts generate lots of revenue, so even if scammers' accounts are doing so, no problem. That's why there's isn't much effort to clamp down on such accounts. The efforts they make that I see are feeble and pretentious.
That's the way the world is built, not just with criminals, but also political leaders, heads of cooperate organizations. Profit is glorified above everything else, even above precious human lives, or the general well-being of the society. How sad.
That, and once they do, it is a slippery slope to clamp down on everything in their opinion. Very little of social media activity is healthy.
It is incredibly sad. I don't understand why we keep pretending that this world is okay.
Oversmartness sometimes kills. One of my relstive kids lost his dad entire bank balance through gaming. He was rhe same person once poked me that, 'the people of my age are not so active' Mere keeping the digital device does not make a person smart. One needs to make themselves familiar with differrnt pros and cons. And also to be agilent while dealing online. But smartness does not comes with digital device, personal experince and spending time with experince helps in learning a lot.
And this is my problem with the "digital native" label. Users are not natives, they are caged animals.
Somehow my son grew up just fine in this environment and we are now living through our daughter growing up, but her interests in this area do not seem to go that way and her phone used to be completely locked down, which I had to relax to let her do more stuff on her phone but I think we keep a pretty tight watch on it... Also, I deviously refuse to upgrade her old and super slow phone under pretenses that it is super ruggedized and iPhones cannot compare...
I wonder at what point it turned though? I suspect that your son is a little bit older. But the neighbours kid (now 16) for example was in a school whatsapp group with boys and girls when he was 11, sending dick and pussy pics to each other.
:D
I believe this is one of the reasons, Austrailia saw it fit to ban social media for children, might have seemed a little bit harsh but the vices or harms are enormous and im sure a lot of other countries will be looking at how successful it will be in Austrailia.
I don't think Australia will be successful.
I think if anything more teenagers will be keen to get on social media because now it feels rebellious.
I think a much better solution would have been a huge education campaign on online dangers to watch out for... and holding tech companies responsible for breaches in safety.
I don't think it will be successful either, but more because kids are resourceful and rebellious. Where there is a will, there is a way.
Haven't there been education campaigns for years? Isn't it pretty basic knowledge that once on the internet, it is there forever? They do teach some of this in schools too, but as said, kids are kids, they don't learn very fast, especially things that tell them not to do what they want to do.
Exactly! I'm sure lots of 16/17 year olds throughout history haven't even cared about getting into a nightclub, but put effort into it purely because they weren't allowed.
If scams are making so much money then I think we can safely say that there isn't nearly enough education for adults or children. We see people fall for obvious misinformation all the time, which is another example that digital literacy education is severely lacking.
I think kids and adults need to be educated to a point where they suspect everything online... and understand what steps to take to verify. How many people know that if a loved one calls you from their phone crying & begging for help/money then the first thing you should do is hang up and call them right back? Chances are they didn't make that call.
I don't think it is harsh, but I think that parents should be doing the banning and the monitoring.
This is a problem for children because they consider themselves more learned or skilled. But they do not consider that there may be someone more skilled than them. And especially the Internet is a complete exception because there are many scams here where even skilled people are victims. Sexual incidents have now increased based on the Internet which is being used to blackmail people. Probably last year a boy in my upazila committed suicide because of this blackmail. Basically, here boys blackmail girls but sometimes girls also blackmail boys but this number is very insignificant. However, both acts are disgusting and a crime.
And in these regards, the professional scammers are far more skilled. But it is the same for adults -adults think they are smarter than the algorithms, which is why the algorithms work so well. People are idiots, when they are up against professionals who study how to manipulate people.
I think It is important for parents and teachers to help kids understand the importance of being careful and aware of their online presenc. One wrong move shouldn't determine their whole future.
It won't be long until we see the first political leaders with OnlyFans pages.
Thanks