Sextortion

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Purposely. Your life, God's purpose. Listen at Purposely.com. Gospel Tech
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FAQs with Nathan Sutherland and Mark Holland.
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And time again for another edition of Gospel Tech FAQs,
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Frequently Asked Questions. Mark Holland joined by Nathan Sutherland. He's
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a Gospel Tech guy, full-time teacher these days, sixth grade teacher,
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and also though has had this ministry for a number
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of years, goes around, speaks to churches and parent, grandparent groups.
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And Nathan, we wanted to address a subject that's coming
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up alarmingly more and more, and that is sextortion. I
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want you to tell us a little bit more what
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you mean by this and how this is affecting young
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men in particular.
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Yeah, so the idea of sexual extortion comes from this world, really,
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of the, what do you call it, the advent of AI,
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where we will have young people online. And sextortion, by
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the way, is the term the FBI uses for this.
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So I did not make this up. But the idea
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is you'll have a young person online. It often is
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young men. They're on social media engaging with people and
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someone reaches out. It typically is a cute young lady.
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And she says something like, wow, you also like math
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or you're really good at those sports or you're super cute.
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And they start a conversation. And at some point, this
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young lady will send a picture of herself without clothes.
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That young man is then encouraged to reciprocate. And many
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times we have documentation of the young man just walking away,
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ignoring it, leaving it. And eventually through persistence, that young
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lady gets him to send one back, except we find
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out that that young lady was deep faked. It is
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not in fact a teenage girl. It's an adult man
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somewhere in the world who then says, hey, I've got
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this picture of you. I'm going to send it to
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everyone you know and ruin your life unless you pay
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me X amount of money. Sometimes it's a couple hundred bucks.
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Sometimes it's in the thousands. Side note, never pay the money.
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Train your child how to tell a loving adult. We
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want them to be healthy and we want these people
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to not be able to do this to other people.
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So while this is embarrassing and horrifying, please, please, please
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reach out to your child and start these conversations about
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where they get their identity because it isn't in the
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fact they've never made a mistake. What we have now, though,
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is just between October 2021 and March 2023, we had
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20 young men in the United States take their lives
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because the level of trauma to them reached such a
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threshold that they believed it was better for them to
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not continue. Just in those kind of 18 months, We
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had 13,000 reports in the United States of sextortion, most
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of them boys. So in 2025, last year, the last
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report I saw was we had more than 54,000 reports.
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So we have more than tripled the number in just
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two and a half years. This is a growing problem.
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We need our young people to know where their identity
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comes from. It comes from a good God who saves
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them as sinners and makes them saints and And when
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we make mistakes, our response is repentance. We acknowledge that
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was wrong. Like, yeah, I shouldn't be sending naked pictures
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of myself to strangers. This is a poor life choice.
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And it doesn't make me a mistake just because I
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made a mistake. We don't pay these people because that
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just incentivize them. There's a whole another conversation to be
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what's happening in the background there. But just know if
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your child is online, strangers have access to them. Some
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of those strangers are nefarious and are looking to literally
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extort money. using deep fake technology to show a fake
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young person and then get a real picture from your
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young person. And we want our young people to know
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that if they're online, they need to know the words
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for this, the word sextortion, the word pornography, and the
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word of God that tells them who they are.
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What you mentioned there, too, is it's not necessarily a
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boy who's surfing porn. That's like a whole other show.
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Right, no.
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But they're just doing normal interacting, and then it kind
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of devolves into this It's extortion, and I can imagine
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how that's quite traumatizing for the child and then the
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family as they find out about this. But again, moms
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and dads need to be calm about this and let
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their kid come to them and tell them what's going on.
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Yeah, and seek your child out. Ask them if they've
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heard of this or if they know anyone this has
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happened to, and then build up healthy hedges. You need
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some accountability around your home network, your personal devices, and
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your family through conversation and relationship. Because relationship is really
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the way you're going to overcome something like this. It's
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not your kid. You can't go look for this situation.
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It has to come to you because that's the premise
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is this is a deep fake person. So they have
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fake accounts. But yes, that relationship is number one. And
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then device and network safety is going to be your
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next step.
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Yeah, tough subject, but we've got to have some guardrails.
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We've got to be informed that this is going on.
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Those are the kinds of frequently asked questions we have
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for Nathan Sutherland, host of Gospel Tech. He covers a
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lot of these subjects and more in-depth on his program,
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Gospel Tech, the long-form version of that show. You can
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hear it on KCIS, Saturday mornings at 8, but also
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a ton of programs online. Purposely.com, YouTube, look for Gospel
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Tech and Nathan Sutherland.
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You can hear the Gospel Tech long-form program with Nathan
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Sutherland at Purposely.com and Saturday mornings at 8 on KCIS.