A 16-year-old Kentucky boy reportedly committed suicide shortly after he was blackmailed with AI-generated nude images, an increasingly common scheme known as “sextortion.”
Elijah Heacock of Glasgow, Kentucky, received a text including an AI-generated nude photo depicting himself and a demand that he pay $3,000 to prevent the image from being sent to family and friends, according to a report by KFDA.
On February 28, shortly after receiving the message, the teen died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Elijah’s parents, John Burnett and Shannon Heacock, told CBS that they didn’t have a solid understanding of the circumstances that led to their son’s death until they found the messages on his phone.
Heacock said she now believes her son was a victim of a sextortion scheme.
“Sextortion is a form of child sexual exploitation where children are threatened or blackmailed, most often with the possibility of sharing with the public a nude or sexual images of them, by a person who demands additional sexual content, sexual activity or money from the child,” the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) explains.
“This crime may happen when a child has shared an image with someone they thought they knew or trusted, but in many cases they are targeted by an individual they met online who obtained a sexual image from the child through deceit, coercion, or some other method,” the NCMEC continued.
“In many cases, the blackmailers may have stolen or taken images of another person and they are communicating through a fake account,” the organization added.
Elijah’s parents said they had never heard of sextortion until law enforcement began investigating their son’s death.
“The people that are after our children are well organized,” Burnett said. “They are well financed, and they are relentless. They don’t need the photos to be real, they can generate whatever they want, and then they use it to blackmail the child.”
NCMEC says sextortion schemes have skyrocketed, revealing the organization has received more than 500,000 reports of sextortion against minors in just the last year.
Since 2021, at least 20 young people have committed suicide as a result of becoming victims of sextortion scams, according to the FBI.
Hellbound and Down 