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Snapchat is rolling out new safety tools aimed at protecting teens from sextortion
Snapchat is working to make it harder for teenagers to be contacted on the app by people they don’t know, its latest effort to stop the sexual and financial exploitation scam known as sextortion.
In addition to expanding Snapchat’s broader suite of youth safety measures, the new features are aimed specifically at preventing financial sextortion, a worrying and growing type of scam across social media where bad actors gain the trust of young users, convince them to send sexual or explicit photos and then demand payment in exchange for keeping the pictures a secret. “These features were designed to better protect teens from potential online harms and to enhance the real-friend connections that make Snapchat so unique,” Snap’s Global Head of Platform Safety Jacqueline Beauchere said in an exclusive statement to CNN ahead of the announcement. Law enforcement officials have in recent years warned of an uptick in online sextortion scams, in which bad actors, typically located overseas, target children and teens, often with profiles that appear to belong to friendly fellow teenagers.
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