Meta has introduced new tools to its social media platform Instagram to protect users from sextortion scams.

Online sextortion usually comes in the form of email or messages, where threat actors will threaten victims that they have sexually explicit images or videos of the victim that they will release if a ransom is not paid.

The heinous practice is on the rise in the UK, with research showing AI is only enhancing cyber-criminals ability to make this targeted crime appear more realistic.

“The dramatic rise in sextortion scams is taking a heavy toll on children and teens, with reports of online enticement increasing by over 300% from 2021 to 2023,” John Shehan, senior vice president form the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), said.

In response, Instagram said it was testing new tools to make their app safer from this crime back in April of this year, and have announced that those tools have now been launched.

This includes new safety features as well as an education campaign aimed at parents and teens using Instagram to better protect themselves from the crime.

The new rules are in addition to Meta’s new teen accounts, which were introduced to Instagram to better protect under 18s from unwanted attention online.

The new additions will make it harder to accounts showing signals of potentially scammy behaviour to request to follow teen accounts. These requests will be either blocked entirely or sent to a spam folder.

Further, Meta says it is testing new safety notices in Instagram DMs and Messenger to let teens know if they are chatting to someone in a different country, as scammers often misrepresent where they live.

Accounts that have shown patterns of ‘scammy behaviour’ will face many restrictions with the new rules, including not being able to see people’s follower or following lists, or the list of accounts that have liked someone’s post, photos they’ve been tagged in, or other accounts they have tagged in their own photos.

In the future, Instagram says that it will not allow people to directly screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent via private messages. This means that photos sent via Instagram’s restricted viewing settings will not be allowed to be screenshot or recorded in the app. These settings will also be restricted on Instagram web.

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In conjunction with this, Instagram will finally be rolling out its nudity protection feature globally after first testing it in April. This will blur images that Meta detects to contain nudity automatically for users under 18, as well as warn users about the risks of sending sensitive images.

Besides these tools, Meta is launching an educational campaign to help users understand the warning signs of a sextortion scam and avoid its consequences.

Meta has worked with the NCMEC and Thorn, both child safety expert organisations, to develop an education video highlighting the red flags of these scams.

“Campaigns like this bring much-needed education to help families recognize these threats early,” Shehan said. “By equipping young people with knowledge and directing them to resources like NCMEC’s CyberTipline, and Take it Down, we can better protect them from falling victim to online exploitation.”

Meta will also feature the Crisit Text Line in the US as an option to for live chat when people report issues related to sextortion or child safety, but currently it has yet to be seen if a similar scheme will be rolled out in other countries.