UK police threaten extraditions to tackle sextortion criminals

Rising toll of victims blackmailed over sexual images

- Libby Brooks, Dan Milmo

The National Crime Agency has warned foreign cybercriminals that it could seek to extradite them as part of a crackdown to tackle an alarming rise in the numbers of young people being targeted for sextortion-blackmailing them over sexual images.

The agency said the gangs, often based in west Africa, were "not safe from prosecution in our country" and that it would seek justice for all victims of the crime.

In cases of sextortion, teenagers are tricked online into sending intimate pictures of themselves to fraudsters who then demand money and threaten to share the material with others.

The Guardian has learned that detailed guides to sextortion in written and video formats are available freely online, with criminals offering individual tuition for further payment.

The NCA said it would introduce a new recording measure to assess the extent of a crime described by the child safety watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) as "the biggest trend we've seen and one of the cruellest".

Sextortion has been implicated in the deaths of at least two teenagers in Britain in recent years. Dinal De Alwis, 16, from south London, described by his parents as a "golden boy", took his own life after being blackmailed over nude photographs.

Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane, died soon after he was targeted by online blackmailers. His parents told the Guardian their family had been "absolutely shattered in the space of a few hours".

Organisations supporting victims are calling on the Labour government and crime agencies to make sextortion a priority to prevent "more lives being devastated".