What to do when a scammer threatens to share your photos
Someone you trusted with private photos, or someone who claims to have them, is now demanding money and counting down. They have pulled up your friends list, maybe your family, maybe your workplace, and the message is always the same: pay or everyone sees. If that is where you are right now, take a breath. This is called sextortion, it is one of the most common scams running today, and there are concrete things you can do in the next hour that actually help.
First, the part that matters most. This is not your fault. These operations run from scripts, often out of organized call-center-style setups, and they target thousands of people at a time. The panic you feel is the product they manufacture. It is also, usually, the only real leverage they have.
Do not pay, even once
Paying does not end it. In case after case, a payment tells the scammer the threat works, and the demands continue or escalate. The FBI's guidance on sextortion is blunt on this point: do not send money, and do not send more images. If you have already paid something, that does not mean you have to keep paying. Stop now. The demands often continue for a while and then fall off, because the scammer's business model depends on moving to the next victim who still responds.
Stop responding, but do not delete anything
The instinct is to erase the whole conversation and pretend it never happened. Resist it. Stop replying, but keep the account, the messages, and the payment demands exactly as they are. Screenshot the profile, the username, the URL, the threats, and any payment addresses or handles they gave you. That material is what lets a platform act, and it is what an investigator needs if this ever goes further. Our guide to preserving evidence in the first 24 hours covers how to capture it cleanly.
Use StopNCII to block the images before they spread
This is the step most people do not know exists. StopNCII.org, run by the Revenge Porn Helpline, lets you create a digital fingerprint (a hash) of the intimate image on your own device. The image itself never leaves your phone. Participating platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, use that fingerprint to detect and block the image if anyone tries to post it. It is free, and you can do it tonight. If the person in the images is under 18, use Take It Down from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children instead, which does the same job and connects to specialist support.
Report the account and file with the FBI
Report the profile to the platform where the contact happened. Every major platform treats sextortion as a serious violation, and a report with screenshots gets accounts removed. Then file a report at IC3.gov with the username, the payment details they demanded, and your screenshots. One report rarely triggers an arrest on its own, but these operations are tracked in bulk, and your report adds to a pattern that investigations are built on.
Lock down, quietly
Set your social accounts to private for a while and prune follower lists if strangers have appeared recently. Do not announce anything or explain anything. If the scammer follows through and sends images to a few contacts, which happens sometimes but far less often than they threaten, a short honest message to those people takes the weapon out of the scammer's hands. Most people respond with far more sympathy than the panic predicts.
If the pressure feels unbearable
Sextortion is designed to make you feel trapped and alone at two in the morning. You are neither. If the weight of this has you in a genuinely dark place, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, by call or text, before you make any decisions. The threat feels permanent. It is not. These campaigns burn out, and people come through this.
When identifying the person matters
Most sextortion is run from overseas accounts that get abandoned within weeks, and the practical goal is containment, not confrontation. But when the person threatening you is someone you know, or the harassment is sustained and targeted, attribution becomes possible and worth pursuing. Our Investigation Help page covers the smaller cases we sometimes take on, and for serious ongoing harassment that needs court-grade attribution we point people to Rexxfield.
You do not have to fix all of this tonight. Do the StopNCII hash, save the screenshots, stop replying. That is a strong first hour, and it is more than the person threatening you expects you to do.
— Gus