What to Do When a Scammer Threatens Your Family

Family group chats usually contain birthday plans, weather reports, and someone asking whose casserole dish they brought home. Now imagine opening the chat to find a stranger posted a sexualized image of someone you love. Then comes a demand for money.

That is the kind of attack described by a recent WSJ article involving Allyson Parmley. A stranger brought her husband and other relatives into a group chat and then shared an explicit image she believes was created with artificial intelligence.

There is something particularly cruel about recruiting a person’s family (let alone children) as an audience. The scammer counts on shock’n’awe: leveraging everyone’s shock, and on the targeted person’s embarrassment.

A Photograph is All it Takes

This is a form of sextortion: using sexual images, or threats involving them, to pressure someone into providing money or more images. The pictures are often fabricated, manipulated using AI to depict the sex act.

The FBI has documented criminals altering ordinary photographs into explicit material. Extortion starts with something as innocuous as a picture from a public social media profile, but the rest of their feed is full of photos. The person targeted may never have spoken to the attacker or shared anything intimate; they were just a target.

Meanwhile, also conveniently mined from social media, the scammer can find public comments, tagged photographs, and visible connections to reveal interpersonal relationships. Heck, a birthday greeting can tell a stranger quite a lot about who matters to you, who you are, and where you live.

Always: before posting a family member’s photo, consider who can see it, and whether everyone pictured wants it shared. The FBI warns that criminals can copy ordinary photos from social media and alter them into explicit images. You might keep children’s pictures and family gatherings in a private album shared with people you know, rather than on a public profile. Avoid tagging relatives without permission, since those connections can also show a scammer whom to contact.

Smart privacy settings can help reduce that exposure. Privacy settings reduce exposure, but they cannot prevent someone from copying a picture. Sharing fewer photos publicly gives strangers less material to misuse; responsibility for that misuse always belongs to the person committing it. Further, curating personal photographs and friend lists are useful steps, but it can’t conceal copies of pics someone already has. Hey, face it: sharing your life on social media has its consequences.

Practical Steps for When a Scammer Threatens Your Family

• Pivot Immediately to Direct, Private Communication. If a threatening image arrives, I recommend you contact the person depicted privately, using a phone number you already know. Don’t email, text, or chat with them — talk to them. Start with something simple: “Someone sent something to me really upsetting. Are you okay? I’m here.” Make yourself emotionally available instead of freaking somebody out. Focus on how you can help them here and now, not the image.

• Handle Children with Care. If a child is involved, reassure them that telling you or showing you the image was the right decision. Don’t get mad at them. The FBI advises responding with kindness and understanding, and specialists at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children strongly encourage young people to involve a trusted adult.

• Suspend Your Judgement. There’s no need to ask them to explain the image before offering support. Its origin doesn’t matter. Whether the image is fabricated or genuine, sharing intimate material without permission is an abuse of that person’s trust and privacy.

• Stop Repeating Slander. Avoid forwarding it to relatives to ask what they think. Don’t make a spectacle of somebody else’s trauma. That’s what the attacker wants. Doing so can spread the harm the attacker is threatening to cause.

• You’ve Nothing to Prove. You do not have to settle the image’s authenticity before seeking help. You don’t even need to provide an explanation. You’re the victim here. There’s no need to respond to it at all. Instead…

• Find Someone you Trust. If you’re the person being threatened, bring someone you trust into the situation. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children recommends blocking the suspect without deleting your profile or messages, because those records may help investigators. Preserve the threatening messages, account names, and payment demands before blocking the sender, and report the account to the service involved and the incident to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

• Don’t Pay, Send More Images, or Bargain for Silence. A demand may come with a countdown or a promise that payment will end everything. Neither gives you a reason to trust the person making it. Don’t pay or send additional images; payment does not guarantee the threats will stop. Rather, it proves to the scammer that their efforts are profitable. The FBI warns that complying does not guarantee the material will remain private. Stop responding rather than trying to persuade the scammer to behave reasonably. If someone has already paid, leave blame out of the conversation. Contact the bank or payment service promptly, explain the extortion, and ask whether the transfer can be stopped or recovered. Keep the transaction details for the report.

• Reduce What the Attacker Can Learn Next. Review who can see your personal posts, connections, and contact information. Ask relatives to check their privacy settings, too. A public friend list can give a scammer more people to contact. Use a different password for each important account and enable the extra sign-in verification offered by your email and social services. These measures follow FBI guidance on manipulated-image extortion. If you find unfamiliar sign-ins or changes to your recovery details, use the service’s official account-recovery process.

• Use established reporting and image-removal services. Report online extortion to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. If a child’s involved, also contact the CyberTipline. An immediate threat to someone’s physical safety belongs with emergency services. Adults can check StopNCII.org, which accepts eligible fabricated intimate images as well as real ones. It creates a digital fingerprint on your device so participating platforms can identify matching uploads; the image itself stays on your device. Its protection does not cover the entire internet or private encrypted chats. For images taken when someone was under 18, Take It Down offers a similar free service. Don’t download or request an image just to submit it.

• Be Cautious About Anyone Charging to “Make this all disappear.” The FBI warns that paid rescue offers can become another attempt to exploit the victim.

Plan Ahead

Scammers are gonna scam. Predators of all stripes are an inevitability — a risk of modern life inasmuch as modern computing, so plan for it.

One thing to do today: choose the trusted person you would call if this happened, and talk to them. Having that conversation beforehand makes asking for help a little easier.Have the conversation before the message arrives. It’s a useful precaution takes about a minute. Tell someone close to you: “If you ever receive a disturbing picture or message about me, call me directly. Please don’t forward it. I’ll do the same for you.” There. It’s a buddy system.

Parents can make that promise to children. Friends can make it to each other. Family can recognize when other family members are in trouble.

Scammers use sextortion to generate embarrassment and to make people feel alone.

Agreeing ahead of time to respond with empathy and care gives everyone somewhere to turn when the day arrives when you need them.

R