The dataset problem is slow and abstract. This one is neither. It arrives as a direct message, it moves in hours, and it is aimed at children who have done nothing wrong except exist online in the ordinary way.
Financial sextortion
The script, and the scale
The FBI reported in January 2024 that between October 2021 and March 2023 it received more than 13,000 reports of financial sextortion of minors, involving at least 12,600 victims, mostly boys, and at least 20 deaths by suicide, between October 2021 and March 2023.
Reports to NCMEC have climbed steeply: 10,731 in 2022, 26,718 in 2023, more than 36,000 in 2024, and more than 50,000 in 2025, roughly 137 a day. NCMEC’s public totals are rounded lower bounds, so the year-on-year change is best described as roughly two-fifths rather than an exact rate. NCMEC has said that at least 36 teenage boys have died by suicide cumulatively since 2021.
Reports received by NCMEC, not unique victims or confirmed incidents. A 2024 law newly required platforms to report this category, which inflates the trend line.
⚠ read these as reports, not incidents
Caveat that belongs with the numbers: the 2024 REPORT Act newly required platforms to report this material, and NCMEC attributes much of the increase to that change. NCMEC counts reports, not victims or confirmed incidents. Sources: FBI, 16 January 2024; NCMEC.
Nudify apps
Built from a school photo
The Internet Watch Foundation reported in March 2026, on 2025 data, that 491 of its reports contained AI-generated child sexual abuse material, a 154% increase. Those reports contained 8,029 criminal images and videos. Of the AI videos specifically, it found 3,443, against 13 the year before. Of the AI videos, 65% were Category A, its most serious classification. Separately, 97% of the AI-generated images depicted girls. Those are two different denominators and we are keeping them apart.
In a Thorn survey published in March 2025 of 1,200 young people aged 13 to 20, one in eight said they personally knew someone who had deepfake nudes made of them while under 18, and one in seventeen said it had happened to them.
⚠ four separate measures, four separate denominators
ISD reported in July 2026 that mainstream platforms sent more than 5.7 million referral visits to the top ten nudify sites between December 2025 and March 2026. The Center for Democracy & Technology found 12% of students (n=1,030, 2025) had heard of deepfake intimate imagery depicting someone at their school.
and then, years later, somebody searches:
Kaplan found in 2023 that 28% of admissions officers surveyed (n=205) had checked an applicant’s social media, and 67% considered doing so “fair game.” An Express Employment / Harris Poll survey of 1,002 hiring decision-makers in December 2022 found 70% of companies research candidates on social media.
An honest note about this entire category: almost every published figure in this area comes from an opt-in industry survey commissioned by a company with a product to sell. The precise percentage is genuinely uncertain. The direction is not.
Start with what can be counted.
↳ the volume, and the money
A first day of school. A hospital bracelet. A birthday with the school name in the background. Individually harmless, collectively a training corpus, and separately, a starter kit for identity fraud against a person who will not check their credit for another fifteen years.
973
photographs of the average child posted online before their fifth birthday.
An often-cited 2015 estimate from a commissioned survey of 2,000 UK parents (Nominet / Parent Zone). Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a measurement.
915,000
US children Javelin estimated were victimized by identity fraud in the year to July 2022, at an average household cost of $1,128.
Javelin Strategy & Research, 2022 wave. This is a commercial study; we could not inspect the underlying report or its methodology, so read it as an estimate rather than a measured count. In Javelin’s 2021 study of 5,000 households, 73% of child victims personally knew the perpetrator.
9,605
identity-theft reports filed with the FTC in 2024 by consumers aged 19 and under.
FTC Consumer Sentinel, 2024. This is a report count, not an estimate of incidence: identity theft involving children can remain undiscovered for years, often until the child applies for credit.
the projection everyone quotes, quoted honestly:
In May 2018, Barclays forecast that sharenting would account for two-thirds of identity fraud facing young people by 2030, at £667 million a year. Barclays did not publish the underlying methodology, and the figure is a projection rather than measured data.
This estimate is frequently repeated without that caveat. It should not be treated as a measured count or a prediction for your family.
Source: Barclays research reported by the BBC, 21 May 2018 · bbc.co.uk
Edited September 29, 2026. Research and source dates are retained; this edit is not a fresh review of every statistic or legal development.
