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Children are being 'preyed on' in 'sickening' online 'modelling' scams - facing blackmail and sexual extortion
7 May 2025, 01:05 | Updated: 20 May 2025, 07:17
Young boys and girls are increasingly facing blackmail and sexual extortion after being targeted by online modelling scams, an LBC investigation can reveal.
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Experts have warned of a growing trend of predators enticing children to send explicit photos of themselves online with the promise of giving them a route into modelling and a coveted influencer lifestyle.
According to one charity, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, there has been a 300% increase in cases over the last three years - from 44,155 in 2021 to 186,819 in 2023.
In fact, criminals are popularising such exploitation in the form of ‘grooming manuals’, detailing how predators can target children as young as 11 years old.
Rhiannon was just 13 when she was groomed online and ultimately sexually assaulted by a man purporting to be a female talent agent:
“It seemed like a really normal conversation. He was posing as a woman, so I thought we were making friends… we shared images to prove we were who we said we were.
“She complimented me and said I was really pretty, asked for more photos, and a few hours into the conversation she floated the idea that I could be a model. She asked for more pictures, then explicit photos, which I really didn’t want to send, but she convinced me it was okay, it was normal and everybody did it, and so I did it.”
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It was at this point, Rhiannon recalls, that things rapidly descended down a sinister path.
“I sent one photo, but that picture was then used to blackmail me for more images, videos, and eventually my home address. The perpetrator came to my house the following morning and sexually assaulted me in my bedroom.
“The main thread of the blackmail was that everyone would see those images. He said he would post them round near my house, around my school, through my door so my dad would see what ‘daddy’s little girl has been up to’, which is sickening even now, but at 13 years old that is so terrifying that you would do whatever you could to stop that happening.
“I was so frightened and so ashamed of what happened, I didn’t tell anybody. I remember thinking I’d be in trouble with the police for wasting their time, so I kept quiet, tried to put it in a little box in the back of my mind and forget it ever happened.
“It was hideous.... I suffered really badly with anxiety, panic attacks, depression, self-harm, and later on suicide attempts, anger issues, trust issues. It’s really hard to explain how impactful it is on a person.
It was only around six months later, when her abuser was tracked down by police for similar crimes committed against other girls, that the authorities became aware of Rhiannon’s ordeal, with her details and photos stored on his computer. He was sentenced to seven years in jail.
Sexual extortion, sometimes referred to as “sextortion”, is part of a growing trend which sees organised crime groups targeting young people who want to make money online.
Along with the fourfold increase in sextortion cases, authorities are increasingly worried about the impact of deepfake nudes and generative AI producing child sexual abuse images.
“These schemes are complex and manipulative. [Victims] might think they’re talking to a peer or someone from school, but once they’ve sent images that’s when the true abuse starts,” Daniel from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) tells LBC.
“They’ll be asked for more explicit images, told if they don’t send them everyone they know will see the images they’ve already taken, they’ll be spread around, and for those kids that could be the end of the world for them.”
Daniel’s work on the IWF’s hotline centres on combating child exploitation online. He told LBC how alarmed he is to see the same techniques of abuse being deployed across the internet, and that it is likely many are referring to ‘grooming manuals’ shared amongst potential predators.
“We have seen through our proactive searches, guides which have been written, some of them are really detailed and really go into depth on how to find children who are going to be more vulnerable.
“It’ll detail the grooming process, how to keep a child in communication with them, and how to sexually extort as many images from them as possible. They call them ‘Sextortion Manuals’ which are put together and freely available, so not always looking to make financial gain from them – that will come from the images of the children.
“For the first time this year we saw images of 11-13 years old being sexually extorted, typically the age is between 16 and 17… No child should be in this position but for someone of that age it’s very concerning.”
Daniel and the team at the IWF are unequivocal that children should avoid sharing intimate images of themselves under any circumstances, but they are realistic that it happens. That’s why they have developed their Report-Remove tool, a safe-haven where children can share images they may have created themselves, anonymously.
“We will catalogue those images, find and remove them if they have been shared by any online platforms we can access, and the NSPCC look after the child and their family to offer them support,” the IWF’s interim chief executive, Derek Ray-Hill, explained.
According to the data compiled by the charity, four in five victims of sextortion are boys, though they have seen an increased number of cases involving girls over the past year.
Exploitation generally differs between the sexes. When the victim is a boy, they tend to be asked to make payments - be it through a card, gift card or video game currency - to prevent the images becoming public. For girls, as happened in Rhiannon’s case, abusers will use the threat of circulating the first image as a means of extracting additional, often more graphic, photos.
Keeping the internet safe with the UK Safer Internet Centre and Nominet
Victims are often offered financial incentives to share images. Aged 16, Caitlyn Farnell, from Newton Heath in Manchester, was sold the dream of a career in modelling and the riches that can flow from an influencer lifestyle, only to be conned out of thousands of pounds.
“When I was younger, modelling was something I really wanted to get into, so I started looking for an agency online, on social media, and the first one I saw was on Facebook. This woman called ‘Samantha’ was pretty much saying ‘if you want to become a model you can earn this much, just apply now’, so I was like ‘OK, this sounds pretty cool.’”
In echoes of Rhiannon’s case, Caitlyn was asked to supply photos, which quickly turned into requests for more explicit content.
“It was pretty much stripping videos,” Caitlyn said of the requests from the agent. “I was already pretty paranoid with this because why would an agency want to ask for this kind of inappropriate content?”
“He [the man presenting as the agency’s manager] contacted me, and said ‘I like the videos, I like the pictures. I want to do a video call with you’, and he was pretty much guaranteeing me a modelling contract, saying “you can be a star, I can give you this amount of money”. In my head I was thinking, ‘Wow, I can actually do this. I can have all this money, I can be free.’
“So I carried on with it and it just got deeper and deeper, he was asking for very inappropriate videos wanting me to do inappropriate things on camera and then I was like ‘no, I need to cut this off because this is making me really uncomfortable.’
“That's when he started threatening me and blackmailing me. He was telling me he's going to send this kind of content to my dad and all this stuff. But I was just like, no, I'm not believing you. I'm cutting this off.”
But having escaped the clutches of one predatory agency, Caitlyn fell victim to another.
She said: “I moved to London when I was 18, working in a dance studio and as a dancer, but you also need photos to build your portfolio. I saw this agency and I thought it was legit because it had a website. They called me in and charged an £800 fee for the interview.
“He made me do cat walks, modelling photos, questioned me on fashion and stuff, and then he brought out the contracts. There were different packages that you could apply for and it all started with a minimum of £100. The one that I chose was a grand, but he never told me it was £1,000. I said, ‘Are you sure that's right?’ and he was like, ‘did you not read the contract?’. I got confused because I didn't see that, but I didn't want to question it in case he didn’t want to sign me, so I paid for it. That's when he said he wanted me to get some more photos to build a portfolio to send off to other companies and stuff to see if I can get auditions.
“I just kept giving him more money because he was promising me these different roles… it was really feeding me the dream. But instead he was just stealing all my money. I heard nothing back from him after that, just completely gone.”
Such modelling scams have affected the lives of thousands of people. In a high-profile case earlier this year, Philip Foster, 49, who starred in the TV soap Brookside, was jailed for eight-and-a-half years for running an operation involving an extensive network of sham modelling agencies.
Foster made over £13.5m targeting around 6,000 aspiring child models, draining the savings of their parents who believed they were helping secure their future.
Adam Groves from Nominet, the domain name registry that funds work to tackle online harms, told LBC that more than four in ten 13-18 years have claimed to make money online, and that whilst this could have benefits, it also increased the risks they face.
“This instinct to try and make money through some kind of side-hustle is not uncommon amongst young people at all,” Groves explains. “It could be a modelling ambition, selling second hand clothes on vinted, trading weapons or character skins within games, it could be live streaming.
“It’s important to say none of these are inherently bad things, they can offer really valuable ways for young people to develop skills but what it means is young people’s digital worlds come with this increasing financial exposure and risks.
“There’s often a perception that scams are mainly a problem of the elderly, and this isn’t the case, it’s a misnomer, and it risks obscuring the reality which is that fraud and financial exploitation of young people is a real problem which we need to recognise and respond to as a society.”
Mancunian model Elisabeth Roselli explained to me how changes in the industry have opened the door for the exploitation of young people:
“When I first started out, you had to be 5’9” and you had to be skinny. Now, it's just literally like anybody can do it. They really just want normal everyday people. I think that's where the big differences come into play and a lot of these people are seeing that and they're like ‘maybe I can do that’, but they don't know how to get into the industry.”
Concerned about the growing number of scammers, Elisabeth, now living in Texas, carried out her own investigation to find out what was going on at two so-called agencies in the UK.
“They turned out to be the same agency,” Elisabeth observed. “You upload a picture of yourself or your child and then they’ve got your phone number and your e-mail address. I did it with a snapshot picture of my daughter, just to see what they're up to and what they're doing. And then this guy phoned me up because he had my phone number and I could tell in the background that he's, like sat in a call centre type of thing, you know, because you can hear it.
“He said: ‘We’ll bring you in. We've got studios in Manchester, Birmingham, London. We'll bring you into our studio. You just have to pay a £50 deposit. Your daughter will get hair and makeup done professionally and then our photographer will take her pictures and do a portfolio to see if she passes the test.’”
Using her knowledge from two decades in the industry, Elisabeth asked how many photos her daughter would require for her portfolio. She was told a minimum of ten photographs would be needed, costing £50-£100 a pop.
“You're talking about anywhere from £500 to £1000 that you're going to give them right at the end of it,” Elizabeth fumed. “They're doing this over and over and over again to people. And they're making millions.”
I asked her what advice she would give to an aspiring model to detect a scam and prevent financial or sexual exploitation.
“Avoid any agency that is going to ask you to pay any money up front. You shouldn't do it all that they require as an agency is what is called polaroids, which all it is is a plain snapshot picture of yourself against a plain white wall as what you look like every day. So that is not being caked up in, in makeup and having your hair done. It's like what they want to see is what you look like when you walk through that door. They don't want you to send professional pictures.”
“These ‘agencies’ are preying on people by doing these scams; the number one rule is you should never ever pay an agency upfront any kind of money at all.”
