Brieanna Charlebois, The Canadian Press Published Saturday, August 6, 2022 11:26 a.m. EDT Last Updated Saturday, August 6, 2022 4:49 p.m. EDT
VANCOUVER – The massive online shift brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a rise in so-called “sextortion scams,” new data from Statistics Canada suggests.
As authorities seek to educate young people and parents about online sex crimes, experts are calling for more regulation, education and enforcement.
Sexual extortion, or sextortion, occurs when someone threatens to distribute private, often sexually explicit, material online if the victim does not comply with their demands, usually for money.
The crime gained national attention nearly a decade ago when 15-year-old Amanda Todd of Port Coquitlam, BC, took her own life after posting a video of herself using flash cards to describe being tormented by an anonymous cyberbully. It has been viewed more than 14 million times.
The trial of her stalker, Dutch national Aydin Coban, began in BC Supreme Court in June.
Pleaded not guilty to extortion, stalking, communication with a juvenile to commit a sexual offense and possession and distribution of child pornography. He was not charged in connection with Todd’s death.
A jury unanimously convicted him of the five charges he faced Saturday after a day of deliberations.
Signy Arnason, associate executive director of the Canadian Center for Child Protection, said the problem has grown exponentially since Todd took her life in October 2012.
“It’s out of control,” he said in an interview.
Police across the country have been issuing warnings to the public about sextortion scams targeting young people.
“Unfortunately, police around the world have tragically seen some of these incidents end in victims taking their own lives,” said the head of the Nova Scotia RCMP Child Exploitation Unit. Mark Sobieraj said in a press release last week. “We are urging parents and guardians to talk to children about the potential dangers, stressing that they can come to you for help.”
Statistics Canada data released Tuesday show police-reported extortion cases in Canada rose nearly 300% in the past decade, but the crime rose significantly during the pandemic.
Incidents of non-consensual distribution of intimate images involving adult or child victims increased by 194 cases in 2021, a nine percent increase from the previous year and a 52 percent increase compared to the average of the previous five years.
“These troubling increases are being facilitated by social media platforms and other electronic service providers,” Canadian Child Protection Center Executive Director Lianna McDonald said in a press release. “It should be a wake-up call.”
Cybertip.ca, a national hotline for reporting child sexual abuse online, said it has received “an unprecedented volume of reports from young people and sometimes their parents concerned about falling for sextortion tactics aggressive”, amounting to around 300 cases of online extortion per month. .
Wayne MacKay, professor emeritus of law at Dalhousie University, said the increase could be partly explained by awareness and better surveillance of cybercrime, but noted research also suggests that child sexual abuse online is often not is reported
A review of the 322 sextortion cases Cybertip.ca received in July found that when the gender was known, 92% of them involved boys or young men.
“The review also showed an emerging tactic where the victim receives nude images of children from the person behind the fake account. The offender will then threaten to report the victim to the police, claiming they are in possession of material of child sexual abuse. Demands for money follow immediately,” the child protection center said in a press release this week.
David Fraser, an internet and privacy lawyer at Canadian law firm McInnes Cooper in Halifax, said the main reason some young people don’t come forward is that they believe they could be accused of child pornography in their own image. . He said this is a widespread misconception, sometimes even among law enforcement.
“We have to be very careful about the messages we send to young people, just to make sure there are safe places they can go and get support before things get heated,” Fraser said.
He cited a 2001 Supreme Court of Canada decision that established a “personal use” exception to child pornography provisions. He said young people have the right to create intimate images of themselves as long as they do not depict illegal sexual activity, are held for private use only and have been created with the consent of the people in the image.
Fraser would like to see more police resources and education on the issue.
“In general, I have seen a lack of skill and competence on the part of the police to take existing laws and translate them into the online context,” he said.
“Extortion is extortion whether you’re extorting someone by threatening to reveal nude images you’ve blackmailed them into providing, or whether you’re extorting someone through other, more conventional forms of blackmail.”
Molly Reynolds, a lawyer at Torys LLP in Toronto, said her civil sextortion caseload has increased significantly.
“The demand is huge. It’s a crisis that’s at least 10 years old and we’re just starting to understand it more broadly across Canada,” he said. “There are still a lot of people who don’t really get police attention when they report this criminal conduct.”
He said civil courts are usually a better option for adult victims who know their perpetrator.
“You’re more likely to see a police response if it can fall under child pornography offences, and not just non-consensual distribution or voyeurism offences,” he said.
“(Children) are, in some ways, better served through the criminal process, whereas adults, I think, more often have to resort to civil processes.”
Darren Laur, director of training at White Hatter, an internet safety and digital literacy education company, said the law has not kept up with technological advances.
He said so-called deep spoofing, in which an existing image or video is used to create fake but believable video footage, will create new challenges because extortionists will no longer have to coerce a person into performing explicit acts.
“The reality is that people will use the goodness of technology and sometimes weaponize it. That’s the problem with deep fakes. I realize that deep fakes will be weaponized, especially when it comes to sex abuse facilitated by technology,” said Laur, who is a retired Victoria Police sergeant.
Reynolds agreed, but said he doesn’t think the law can ever “keep up with the technology and the harm it can create.”
“I think the courts have a very important role to play in interpreting what we already have, and allowing it to evolve in the same way that technological risks evolve. We need to be able to make it easier for people to bring these cases to court, whether it’s criminal or civil, and test the boundaries,” he said.
McDonald, with the Canadian Center for Child Protection, has begun calling for more regulation of social media companies, including Snapchat and Instagram, where the organization has found most of the harm to children.
“This is an ongoing problem that is getting worse and so it really begs the question of what are these companies doing to protect children? It’s unbelievable that social media platforms allow total adult strangers to directly approach and target our children without consequence,” he said in a press release Thursday.
Laur said he has been calling for an online regulatory agency, like Australia’s e-security commissioner, for years.
“They basically have the plan of how to do it,” he said. “We need something similar here in our country.”
The Department of Canadian Heritage said in a statement that the federal government is “developing an approach to address harmful content online, which includes the potential creation of a regulatory body.”
As part of that process, he said Heritage Minister Pablo RodrÃguez “is holding roundtables across Canada to listen to victims of online harm, including children and youth.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on August 6, 2022.