Organised criminal networks operating from West Africa are blackmailing British teenage boys and young men at an accelerating rate, using social media platforms, dating apps and gaming sites to extract explicit images before demanding money under threat of public exposure.
The scale of the problem, charities and law enforcement bodies warn, is now such that secondary school and university students in the UK are being approached by scammers on average almost twice a week.
What ‘sextortion’ looks like on a British teenager’s phone
The pattern, described by investigators and victims’ families, is strikingly consistent. A stranger, typically posing as a young woman, makes contact through TikTok, Instagram, a dating app or a gaming platform. The profile is built from AI-generated imagery or photographs harvested from real accounts. A few weeks of friendly exchanges follow, moving across platforms from public comments to direct messages, iMessage and email.
Once an explicit photograph is sent, the tone shifts in an instant. Victims are met with a torrent of threats and demands for payment. In one exchange seen by The Telegraph, a scammer counts down — “Three, two, one… Last chance to save ur life…. Pay money and go free” — before vowing to distribute the image to the victim’s family, friends and followers.
One boy, who had just turned 14 when he was targeted, described how a “girl” began following him on TikTok. Innocuous conversation about games and school escalated to an exchange of selfies, then a photograph of the supposed girl in her bedroom. He was persuaded to send something explicit in return. “They immediately asked for money,” he said, describing a state of “blind panic”. The scammer, now addressing him as “dude”, threatened to distribute a screen recording to his family, friends and the wider TikTok audience. “[I’ll] make it go viral in your school also,” they wrote.
The teenager told them he had only £20 and was pressured into buying an Apple Gift Card — a favoured instrument for these scams because it can be redeemed quickly and is difficult to trace. When the money was deemed insufficient and a demand for £50 followed, he turned to his mother. “Thankfully, the panic was stronger than the embarrassment, which meant he told me as soon as it happened,” she said. “Every child is different, my other child might not have shared this and might have internalised it. But he came to me immediately.” She contacted police, Nationwide and Apple; investigators traced the email address to a user in Nigeria.
Why young men dominate the victim profile
The demographic picture is unusually skewed. An analysis of 50 cases by Nationwide found that 98 per cent of identified victims were male, with an average age of 25. Almost half were aged between 20 and 29, although cases range from children as young as 13 to pensioners in their seventies.
Reports to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) indicate a sharp rise in incidents involving young people. The charity logged 397 sextortion cases in 2025, compared with 175 the previous year, and has warned that UK teenagers are being targeted “like never before”. Report Remove, a free service run jointly by Childline and the IWF that allows under-18s to have intimate images taken down without disclosing their identity, received 891 reports in the first half of 2025 — a significant jump from the 536 logged in the equivalent period a year earlier.
The National Crime Agency has described sextortion as a “hideous” crime and cautions that the true figure is almost certainly far higher than reported, given the stigma that prevents many victims from coming forward. Previous analysis has suggested that offences against children in the UK alone could run to the high thousands.
Messages sent to the Childline helpline — shared with The Telegraph — convey the isolation that shapes victims’ responses. A 16-year-old said he feared his classmates finding out and was unsure whether to tell his parents. A 17-year-old described being “so scared every time I receive a notification on my phone cos [sic] I worry this will be the day my nudes get posted”. Another 16-year-old said a scammer had told him “they’d been playing me” and warned that his reputation would be “destroyed” unless he paid.
The rise of the ‘Yahoo Boys’ and a lucrative criminal economy
Behind the messages is an increasingly organised criminal industry. Investigators point to networks operating principally out of Nigeria and Ghana, with additional activity in South East Asia. Some campaigns have been linked to groups self-styled as “BM Boys” or “Yahoo Boys”, the latter term rooted in the notorious “Nigerian prince” email scams of the 1990s.
On TikTok, young men identifying themselves by these labels post videos of themselves fanning out bundles of cash, dancing and displaying heavy gold jewellery. Examples flagged to TikTok by The Telegraph were removed for breaching community guidelines.
The business model is international. In 2024, two brothers from Lagos who had sextorted 17-year-old Jordan DeMay were extradited to the United States and sentenced to 17 years and six months in prison. The Ogoshi brothers had posed as a girl of his age, convinced Jordan to send explicit images and then demanded $1,000 (£740) — money he could not pay. He took his own life less than six hours after the messages began.
US Attorney Mark Totten said the sentencing sent a “thundering” message: “You are not immune from justice. We will track you down and hold you accountable, even if we have to go halfway around the world to do so.”
A crime whose greatest weapon is silence
For British police and charities, the challenge is twofold: disrupting overseas networks that operate beyond the immediate reach of UK law enforcement, and persuading victims to come forward despite the profound embarrassment that offenders deliberately exploit. The mother of the 14-year-old boy said she reported the incident in part because she wanted authorities to grasp the scale of what young people may be facing. Her decision to speak out reflects a broader point stressed by investigators: that the most dangerous feature of this crime is the silence that surrounds it.
