Attempt to sextort teen caught by school’s monitoring system, TX officials say
.png "Faculty at a Texas school discovered one of their students was being threatened with sextortion after an online monitoring system flagged troubling activity, officials said.")
A Texas school district’s online monitoring system helped catch a sextortion attempt against a student, officials said.
On Wednesday, April 16, Gordon Independent School District’s monitoring software “flagged” a student searching about suicide and sextortion cases online, and concerned faculty spoke to the child and learned they were being threatened, Superintendent Holly Campbell said in a news release.
“The student received a text message from an unknown number claiming to have inappropriate photos and demanding money in exchange for not sharing the images,” Campbell said. “The sender also threatened to contact the school to further humiliate the student.”
Campbell said the school became aware of the student’s online search “within one minute” of them making it and were able to quickly get in touch with them and their family.
“While the message appears to be spam originating from Nigeria, the student did not realize that at the time and was understandably very frightened,” Campbell said, adding that “the emotional impact was significant.”
“While no such pictures ever existed, it scared them very much,” she said.
Authorities including the FBI have been sounding the alarm about sextortion scams, which have become increasingly common in recent years, McClatchy News reported.
Teens and young people are often the target of sextortion schemes, and the stress and fear of humiliation has pushed some victims to make tragic decisions, such as 17-year-old Jordan DeMay, who died by suicide in 2022 after sextortionists said they would share explicit photos of him with his family and friends unless he paid them off. DeMay was dead less than six hours after receiving the first message from the perpetrators.
“We are treating this incident with the utmost seriousness. It has been reported to law enforcement and is currently under investigation,” Campbell said of the incident at Gordon ISD.
“Please take this opportunity to talk with your child about the risks of online communication, especially with unknown individuals, and the importance of never sharing personal or sensitive content. Most importantly, remind them that if they ever feel unsafe, embarrassed, or threatened, they should tell a trusted adult immediately. We are here to help—without judgment,” she said.
Gordon, a small town of about 500 people, is a roughly 70-mile drive southwest from Fort Worth.