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Warning: This story contains references to mental health and suicide.
One Monday, on the bus to university, I scroll through my Facebook feed to find three different people I don’t know in real life have sent me a friend request. Their “names” are Larna Dove, Jessica Smith and Michelle Costner.
Larna Dove’s profile picture depicts a young girl in a revealing neck top and her introduction contains this message: “Don’t ask them about me, if you ask them about me, they will tell you there [sic] assumptions about me.”
Sexual extortion, or sextortion, is a serious form of intimate image-based blackmail and it often begins with a scammer sending a friend request to a boy on social media via a fake profile, posing as a young, attractive teenage girl.
The scammer then builds up a “friendship” with the victim and asks him to send an explicit sexual photo, which, once received, they threaten to leak if the victim does not pay a hefty sum of money.
Two years ago, the only victims of sextortion were adults. Susan McLean, a cyber-safety expert and former Victoria Police officer, says “these offenders work on being able to friend a number of people in a circle even though you don’t know me”.
“It was never a kid thing,” says McLean of the initial scams around sextortion. “The landscape changed when offenders worked out that kids were easy victims.”
Mac Holdsworth with his father Wayne: "We gradually saw him decline."SUPPLIED
At 17, Mac Holdsworth accepted a friend request on Snapchat from a person he believed was a 15-year-old girl. “Hi Sweety, what do you do?” she asked on Snapchat. Mac told her that he was the captain of his local footy team and liked to work out at the gym.
The girl said he was handsome and sent him a picture of her breasts. Mac responded by sending a nude photo of himself without his head in the shot but the girl wanted to see his face, so she asked him to send a complete nude picture of himself. He did that.
Then his phone rang. It turned out Mac had not sent his private pictures to a girl on Snapchat. He had been tricked and his intimate photos were now in the possession of a 45-year-old man from Liverpool, in western Sydney who had hidden behind a young girl's avatar. The scammer demanded money.
“Mac, you are going to put $500 into this bank account in five minutes or I will send [the nude photo] to all your contacts,” he said.
Mac paid him the money but the scammer continued to make threats about distributing the intimate images to his friends and family online.
Mac's father, Wayne Holdsworth, CEO of Melbourne’s Frankston and District Basketball Association, says the sextortion of his 17-year-old son marked the “turning point in terms of his life”.
“We gradually saw him decline as a person," Holdsworth told Newsworthy. "He was captain of the footy team; he relinquished that responsibility.”
On October 23, 2023, many months after the nude photo incident, Mac took his own life. In a note his father later found, Mac said he felt like a burden.
“Things haven’t been the same for me since that photo. I’m really embarrassed. I’ve let you down. I am so sorry,” Mac's note read, as reported by Daily Mail Australia.
'If this gets introduced, young people will find ways around it. They can use a VPN.'
Over the past decade, 11 young people in Australia have taken their lives to suicide after being victims of sextortion. Wayne Holdsworth believes the social media companies, particularly Meta “do not care for the health and welfare of Australian children”.
“They (Meta) know that social media is having a massive negative impact on children, but their focus is on raising more revenue through advertising,” he says. “It’s a generation that’s at risk."
Meta did not respond to requests for comment about alleged sextortion scams circulating on Facebook and Instagram.
“At the moment parents are trying their best to limit access to the platform, but they are fighting a losing battle because all the other kids at school have it.” He is part of News Corp’s "Let Them Be Kids" campaign, calling on the Australian Government to restrict children under 16 from accessing social media.
More than 53,000 peoplehave signed New Corp’s petition to raise the age for social media access since it was launched in May this year.
Holdsworth says he hopes legislation will pass by November “to ensure this starts to take place”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has committed to introduce a bill this year but says the age cut off will not be decided until the government has trialled age verification technology. Federal Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton has also spoken out in support for the policy.
Not all agree legislation is the answer. Professor Nicola Henry, a socio-legal scholar and researcher in the field of image-based sexual abuse at RMIT University in Melbourne, says the proposed social media ban for under 16 year olds would be a “reactive, band-aid approach".
“If this gets introduced, young people will find ways around it. They can use a VPN (virtual private network) for example.”
Henry says the focus should be on “educating young people about what the risks are of engaging with strangers online” in a “very sensitive way”, which means not victim-blaming.
As he waits for government action, Holdsworth has founded a charity, Smack Talk, in memory of his son. He runs suicide prevention workshops in Melbourne, helping other parents identify what mental health signs to look for in their children.
So far, he has delivered over 42 suicide prevention workshops to more than 4,500 people.
“Today, in Victoria there will be three to four funerals for people who have committed suicide,” says Holdsworth. “It’s an epidemic and there’s not enough being done about.
“We have reduced the road toll in Australia significantly through better education, seatbelts and cars. Why don’t we do the same about suicide?”
