After a Kentucky teen committed suicide this year, his parents found that they received threatening texts demanding $3,000 to suppress his AI-generated nude images, AFP reports.
The tragedy highlights how so-called scams targeting children around the world are growing, especially with the rapid spread of “nudy” apps.
Elijah Heacock, 16, was just one of the thousands of American minors targeted by such digitally frightening mail.
His parents told us the media that text messages ordered him to pay, or that nude photos that were clearly generated by AI would be sent to his family and friends.
“The people after our children are well organized,” John Burnett, the boy's father, told CBS News in an interview.
“They are well funded and have no mercy. They don't have to make the photos authentic, they can generate whatever they want and use them to blackmail the child.”
US investigators were investigating cases that came as a prominent nudhi app targeting celebrities.
The FBI has reported a “terrifying increase” of sexlid cases targeting minors in the US, with victims reporting that males are usually between the ages of 14 and 17. This threat led to “an astonishing number of suicides.”
A recent survey found that Thorn, a nonprofit focused on preventing online child exploitation, found that 6% of American teenagers are direct victims of deepfake nude.
“Reporting fakes and deepfakes – many of them are generated using these “nudification” services, but appear to be closely linked to reports of financial sextitres or horrifying mail with sexually explicit images,” the UK's Watchdog Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said in a report last year.
“Attackers no longer have to source intimate images from their children because, as they can be generated using the generator AI, images they want to be harmful, perhaps even as harmful as the actual images.”
The IWF has identified one “pedophile guide” developed by predators. This explicitly encouraged perpetrators to use nudification tools to generate material in their children. The guide's author claimed he managed to blackmail the 13-year-old girl.
Tools are lucrative business.
A new analysis of 85 websites selling Nudify services found it worth up to US$36 million a year.
