Australia eSafety regulator warns of sexual extortion

Australia's online safety regulator has issued a stark warning to major technology companies, accusing them of failing to address critical gaps that allow sexual extortion to thrive on their platforms. A new transparency report from the eSafety Commissioner, published on July 13, 2026, details over 2,000 complaints of sexual extortion received in the second half of 2025 and exposes significant weaknesses in detection and prevention systems.

The report found that Instagram and WhatsApp were the platforms most frequently cited in complaints, appearing together in more than 1,300 reports. For users under 18, Apple's iMessage and Snapchat were the services most commonly linked to threats. While young men aged 18 to 24 filed the most complaints of any single group, the regulator noted that younger teenagers are increasingly being targeted by scammers.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant described the situation as having reached catastrophic proportions, with Australian boys and young men being brutally targeted by organized criminal networks daily. She stated that offenders are exploiting predictable weaknesses in platform design, weak detection systems, and inconsistent...