Teen girls are most-common target of sextortion, OKC detective says

Increasing online sexual extortion, or "sextortion" cases, are worrying safety advocates and causing some frightened victims to give in to demands such as posing for explicit photos or having sex with the perpetrator.

Teen girls are the most- common target, said detective Rob Kemmet with the Oklahoma City Police Department's Predator Interdiction Unit, but it can happen to almost anyone.

The unit is investigating a case of a man who threatened to send a woman's husband a link to a porn site, where he'd posted an unseemly photo of her at a bachelorette party, unless she met his demands.

"That's extortion. Whether it's on the Internet or not on the Internet, a crime is a crime," Kemmet said.

National statistics don't yet exist, but the unit has gotten more reports of sextortion.

"We really do know that this stuff is horribly underreported," Kemmet said.

Federal papers coined the term sextortion in the case of a California man charged in July with hacking into computers to steal data and sexually explicit photos of more than 200 girls and women, then blackmailing them into making more videos for him.

Sextortion often begins with teens "sexting" — sending sexually suggestive photos or messages over the computer or cell phone. Fifteen percent of 12- to 17-year-olds say they have received sexted photos, and 4 percent say they have sent suggestive or nude photos, a 2009 Pew Research Center poll shows.

Kemmet said information used by sextortionists sometimes comes from advertising websites. He said Facebook and MySpace have become more vigilant after a Wisconsin man got a 15-year prison sentence in February for posing as a girl on Facebook and tricking male high schoolers into sending him nude photos that he used to extort them for sex.