Helping financial institutions detect and disrupt financially motivated sextortion is the aim of a notice issued Monday by the Treasury’s anti-financial crimes arm.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said the notice “underscores the importance of suspicious activity reporting (SAR) to support law enforcement investigations into these abusive schemes and protect Americans from this gross abuse of the U.S. financial system.”
FinCEN described financially motivated sextortion as that which occurs when perpetrators, using fake personas, coerce victims to create and send sexually explicit images or videos of themselves, only to threaten to release the material to the victims’ friends and family unless the victims provide payment.
The agency called the practice “a disturbing and increasingly common typology that can devastate the lives and families of its victims.”
In a release, FinCEN said financially motivated sextortion is dramatically increasing, targeting boys. It asserted that perpetrators use AI to carry out sextortion and online child-sexual exploitation.
The agency said it urges financial institutions to be vigilant in identifying and reporting suspicious activity that may relate to financially motivated sextortion schemes.
“FinCEN is releasing this Notice, along with red flag indicators, to help financial institutions detect and better report this activity by filing SARs, which may aid law enforcement in disrupting these actors and prevent further victimization,” the agency stated.