An Analysis of Financial Sextortion Victim Posts Published on r/Sextortion

This study was conducted by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection Inc. (C3P), a national charity dedicated to the personal safety of all children. C3P operates Cybertip.ca, Canada’s tipline to report child sexual abuse and exploitation online. In addition to responding to concerns of child sexual abuse and its recording and distribution online, in recent years we have seen a massive increase in online sexual violence. This includes but is not limited to reports of sextortion, luring, non-consensual distribution of intimate images, doxing, and stalking.

This report presents analyses of one of the largest financial sextortion discussion/support forums on the internet, reddit.com/r/Sextortion. Two forum data sources were analyzed for this study. One was open-source archives from July 2020 to September 2022, which provided historic forum trends. The second was 478 narratives of victims describing their experience of being financially sextorted, posted to r/Sextortion from June 10 to August 10, 2022.