Sextortion and online extortion: help for US clients from a UK internet law firm

By Yair Cohen, Solicitor specialising in internet law

If someone is sextorting or extorting you online and the person, the platform or the evidence has any connection to the UK, you have options that a US lawyer working alone often cannot offer. The most important things to do right now are the same wherever you are: stop engaging, do not pay, and preserve the evidence. After that, we can move quickly to protect you. We obtain emergency UK court orders that stop the material being published, keep your name off the public record, and force platforms and payment processors to hand over what they know about the person behind the account. This page is written for clients in the United States, and explains how we help, why the UK route can succeed where the US one stalls, and what it costs.

We are Cohen Davis, a specialist internet law firm in London, regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Sextortion and online extortion are among the matters we are asked to help with most, and a growing number of those clients are in the United States. The reason US victims come to a UK firm is straightforward: where the extortion has a UK connection, English law gives you tools the American system does not.

What sextortion and online extortion are

Sextortion is extortion that uses intimate or sexual images, and online extortion is the wider category of threats made online to expose, harm or embarrass you unless you pay or do something. The pattern is familiar and it is designed to work fast. An online connection moves quickly to flirtation, there is a request to exchange explicit images or to go on camera, and then comes a demand for money or for more material, with a threat to send what they have to your family, your employer, your church or your followers. The FBI now warns that financially motivated sextortion has risen sharply, and the people behind it are frequently organised groups operating from overseas.

It is worth holding on to one thing if this is happening to you. The wrong here is the threat and the demand, not whatever the extortionist claims to have. It does not matter whether the images are real, faked, or were shared willingly. You are the victim of a crime, not the wrongdoer, and the shame the extortionist relies on is exactly what keeps people from getting the help that would end it.

What to do right now

The single most useful thing you can do is take advice before you pay or reply at length, because the first moves shape everything that follows. Beyond that, there is a clear order of priorities we take clients through, and you can start on it before you ever speak to us.

First, stop communicating with the extortionist, but do not delete anything. The messages, the profile, the payment demands and anything they have sent are your evidence, and a court will want to see them. Take screenshots that capture usernames, dates and times. Second, do not pay, and do not be rushed. Paying almost never ends it; it confirms the threat works, and a second demand usually follows the first. The urgency is manufactured to stop you thinking clearly. Third, secure your accounts, change your passwords and tighten your privacy settings so the extortionist cannot reach further into your life. Fourth, take specialist legal advice early, so your options, including the UK ones, are open before anything is published.

Paying a sextortionist is not the end of it. It is the start of the next demand. The thing that actually ends these cases is taking away the two things the extortionist relies on: your silence and their anonymity.

Why the UK route can work when the US one stalls

What US victims come to us for is speed. The English courts will grant an emergency injunction within a few days, often the same week, and sometimes within hours. A US lawyer working on the same kind of case is up against the First Amendment, which protects a great deal of online conduct, and against Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields platforms from liability for what their users post. Both make it hard to force a quick civil result against an anonymous extortionist or the platform hosting the material. Reporting to the FBI through the IC3 portal is right and we encourage it, but a criminal investigation does not move on the timescale of a deadline an extortionist has given you this week. England gives you a route that does.

England starts from a different place. There is no First Amendment here and no Section 230-style immunity. The English courts will grant an emergency injunction that forbids publication, an anonymity order that keeps your name off the public file, and a disclosure order that compels a platform, bank or payment processor to reveal what it knows about the person behind an account. Those orders can be obtained in days, sometimes within hours. Where the extortionist is in the UK, or the platform or evidence is connected here, that combination gives you a realistic route to stop the threat that you may not have at home.

How we help, step by step

We protect you first and investigate second, because the priority is to make sure the threat cannot be carried out while the rest of the work is done. The first step is usually an emergency injunction combined with an anonymity order. The injunction forbids the extortionist from publishing or sharing the material, or from contacting you; the anonymity order means the case proceeds under initials, so your real name never appears on the public court record. You do not have to be in the UK, and in most cases you do not have to be named, because we bring the application for you under a pseudonym.

Next, where the extortionist is anonymous, we work to identify them. The English route is a Norwich Pharmacal order, a court order that requires the platform or payment processor to hand over the information that helps identify the account holder. For a US reader, it works much like a third-party information subpoena. Where the evidence sits with a US company, we add a discovery application in the United States under 28 U.S.C. § 1782, which obtains evidence located in the US for use in the English proceedings. The detail of how we combine these routes is on our page on handling a cross-border blackmail or extortion case.

Alongside the court orders, we run open-source intelligence work in-house. We do not outsource the identification side. Our investigators sit in the same building as the solicitors handling your matter, and they have the licensed databases, dark-web tooling and pattern-matching skills that turn a partial disclosure into a name and address. OSINT is often the follow-up to a court order, for example when a Norwich Pharmacal disclosure produces an email address or a payment trail but not a full identity. In other cases it is the alternative route altogether, where the platform is outside UK jurisdiction or where the timescale of a § 1782 application does not fit. It can also run alongside the court orders from the outset, where speed matters and the evidence allows for both. The fuller method is on our page on how we identify anonymous internet users using open-source intelligence.

Why an extortionist will not stop unless something forces them to

An extortionist will not stop because you ask them to, and they will not stop because you paid. Paying is what tells them to come back. Once you have paid, in their eyes you become a tree bearing fruit, and the demands carry on until something changes the situation for the person making them.

In our experience the thing that changes it is consequences. Exposure of who they are, a court order forbidding what they have been doing, the prospect of arrest, contempt of court, a costs order against them, or any combination of those. Without one of them, they have no reason to stop. With one of them, they tend to move on and find someone else.

This is why the work is built around taking the two things they rely on. Their anonymity, which the disclosure order takes from them, and your silence, which we take by being the people they now have to deal with instead of you. Once the person behind the account has been identified and served with a court order, the matter usually stops. The calculation that made the threats worthwhile from their side has changed. They are no longer paying nothing to threaten you. They are facing a consequence.

An extortionist who is exposed and facing a court order is no longer paying nothing to threaten you. The matter usually stops at that point.

Finally, we bring the matter to an end on the route that fits your situation, whether that is a civil claim, a permanent injunction, support for a criminal complaint, or a negotiated resolution once the extortionist knows they have been identified. Once someone is named and served with a court order, the leverage they relied on is usually gone, and many matters stop there.

The law behind the protection

It helps to know what the English remedies are actually built on, because there is no civil claim simply called "blackmail" or "extortion". Blackmail is a criminal offence under section 21 of the Theft Act 1968. The civil injunction that protects you is built on the law of harassment, under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, and on the misuse of private information, where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in what the extortionist is threatening to expose. Those are well-established and they are available to an overseas victim whose extortionist or evidence is connected to this country.

There is also a point of jurisdiction worth raising early, because it is exactly where some US victims are wrongly told nothing can be done. For harassment, English law generally treats the wrong as happening where the victim is, not where the perpetrator is, so a claim built only on harassment can raise a question about whether the English court is the right forum when you are in the United States with no other connection to the UK. In extortion and sextortion cases we usually get past that by relying less on harassment and more on two common-law claims that fit these facts better: misuse of private information and breach of confidence. Both are about the threatened disclosure of your private material rather than the pattern of harassing messages, and the wrong the extortionist intends, publishing what they hold, is something they intend to do from here in the UK. That is normally enough to let us bring the claim and obtain an injunction against a UK-based extortionist even though you live abroad.

Breach of confidence is especially powerful where the material came out of a relationship of trust. If you shared intimate images or private confidences with a partner, and that person, or someone who later obtained the material, now threatens to expose it, English law treats information given in confidence as protected, and that protection survives the end of the relationship. Many of the cases we see, from an ex-partner threatening to post images to a stranger who gained your trust online, sit squarely within this principle.

Where intimate images are involved there is also a specific criminal offence. Under section 66B of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, in force since 31 January 2024, it is a crime to threaten to share an intimate image, and that offence applies even if the image does not actually exist or was never really in the extortionist's hands. That matters because the threat to release an image is often a bluff, and the law treats the threat itself as the crime.

For US clients: how working with a UK firm actually works

You never need to travel, and your identity stays protected throughout. We act for you remotely, the application is brought under a pseudonym, and the anonymity order keeps your name off the public record, so the whole matter can be handled without the exposure the extortionist is threatening you with. We coordinate with US counsel where the case needs a § 1782 application or a step taken inside the United States, so the US and UK sides of your matter move together rather than as two separate files.

On the practical side, we give every overseas client access to a secure app you can download to your phone or use through any browser on your computer. Everything to do with your case sits in one place: you can message us at any hour of the day or night, upload screenshots and documents straight from your camera roll or your desktop, and review draft witness statements before they are finalised. The 5 to 8 hour time difference between London and the United States stops being a problem, because what you send arrives in our system immediately and is waiting for us when our day begins. For most US clients this is the channel that does the bulk of the work, and meetings happen by video when they need to.

We are also used to working alongside your own US attorney, not in place of them. Many of our US clients come to us through their American lawyer, and we are glad to keep that lawyer involved throughout, or to hold the first meeting with the two of you together so your attorney can satisfy themselves that the UK route is the right one for you. You should feel confident that the people handling this for you do this work all the time, and we would much rather you reached that confidence with your own adviser in the room than take it on trust. If you do not already have a US lawyer, that is no obstacle either; many of our US matters are handled entirely from this side.

We also work alongside, not instead of, the criminal route at home. Reporting financially motivated sextortion to the FBI through IC3 is worthwhile, and if minors are involved the matter should go to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and to law enforcement immediately. The civil route we offer is about speed and control: stopping publication now, protecting your identity, and reaching the person behind the account, while the criminal process takes its own course. This work sits within our cross-jurisdiction internet law practice for international clients, and our general page on internet blackmail and sextortion covers the UK-facing picture.

Why timing and tactics matter

These cases reward careful planning and they punish a rushed application, which is the main reason to take expert advice before any court step is taken. An injunction is a powerful tool, but it is not free of risk. If an application has to be made on notice to the other side, or if a without-notice application does not succeed, the extortionist may learn that you have taken legal action against them, and someone who senses that a step against them has failed can be emboldened rather than deterred. The questions of whether to apply, how, and above all when, have to be judged tactically and at the right moment, with the evidence properly prepared first. This is the part of the work where an experienced specialist earns their place, and it is the main reason we would caution against a do-it-yourself application or a generalist filing something quickly just to be seen to act.

The worst outcome is a hasty application that fails and tells the extortionist you have shown your hand. Getting the timing and the tactics right is often the difference between ending the threat and feeding it.

What it costs and what to expect

Every matter starts with an initial consultation with a solicitor, so you know where you stand before committing to anything. On that call we tell you whether an injunction is realistic, what the likely route is, and what it should cost in pounds, so there are no surprises. What a case costs depends on what it takes to resolve: some are settled with a single firm approach to an identified extortionist, others need an emergency injunction, and a few need identification work in the UK and the US as well.

For US clients there is often a pleasant surprise on cost. UK legal fees for this kind of work tend to be lower than the fees charged by comparable litigation firms in the United States, and the English courts give fast, effective remedies without the very large up-front retainers some US firms ask for. We also try to keep the cost proportionate to what your matter actually needs, with a fixed-fee initial consultation and, where the facts allow, lower-cost routes such as a single measured approach to an identified extortionist or a streamlined disclosure application before anything more expensive is considered. We will always tell you the cheapest route that has a realistic chance of working, not only the most thorough one.

On outcomes, the realistic shape of a resolution is usually this: the material is contained and not published, your name is kept out of the public record, and once the extortionist is identified and served with a court order, the threats stop. We are also straight about the limits. No solicitor can guarantee that a determined, anonymous, overseas operator will be identified or caught, and a cross-border case carries more time and cost than a purely domestic one. We would rather tell you that on the first call than after you have spent on a route that cannot reach the person doing this.

A case we handled for a US couple

One matter shows how these cases reach us and how they get to an end. Identifying details in this account have been changed for privacy. A US client, who we will call X, lives in Florida with her husband. A family member of theirs in Birmingham, England, who they had supported through a long battle with addiction by hosting her in their Florida home for months, used the time of the stay to photograph the screen of X's phone, capturing private material relating to a relationship X had had years before her marriage. After the family member returned to England, she turned that material into a campaign of extortion, threatening to send it to X's husband, his family and his employer unless she was paid.

X tried the police in Florida first. She was told the matter looked civil, that the report would stay on file, and that the force would be in touch only if the messages crossed a different line. They did not come back to her. The threats continued, the demands grew, and X carried the matter alone while she became unwell with the strain of it.

X reached us at her lowest point. Within days of the first call we obtained a High Court anonymity order and an interim injunction without notice, the order was served on the family member in England, and the threats stopped. The whole matter was over inside a fortnight of the first call. We never went to a contested trial. The full account, including how we chose between the harassment, misuse of private information and breach of confidence claims for an overseas client, and what the case shows about blackmail that comes from somewhere close, is set out on our case of a Florida couple blackmailed by a UK family member.

Frequently asked questions

I have already paid. Is it too late to come to you?

No, and we hear this often. Paying the first demand is what most victims try before they look for help, and we are used to picking the matter up from there. What changes after a first payment is the dynamic, not the law. The second demand is likely to come, and it will probably be larger. Coming to us at that point is the right time. We work out what evidence you have, what the platform side looks like, and what an injunction would now stop. The money already paid is not always recoverable, and we will tell you on the first call what the realistic prospect of recovery is in your situation.

What do I tell my spouse, my family, or my employer?

That is your decision, and it is one we walk through carefully with every overseas client. There is no legal duty to tell anyone outside the work we do for you, and the anonymity order is designed to keep the matter out of the public record. Some clients want to bring a partner in from the start, because the stress of carrying it alone is part of what the extortionist is relying on. Others want to deal with it without telling anyone, and that is workable too, because we can take the entire matter from the first call to the final order without anyone in your personal life being notified.

What if the images are fake, or were never really sent?

It does not matter for the legal protection, and that is one of the most important things to understand if you are being threatened with material that does not actually exist. Under section 66B of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, in force since 31 January 2024, it is a criminal offence in England to threaten to share an intimate image, and the offence applies whether the image is real, faked, or never existed in the first place. The civil remedies follow the same shape. The wrong is the threat, not the underlying material, and the injunction protects against the threat being carried out regardless of whether the extortionist is bluffing.

Will reporting to the FBI through IC3 slow down or block what you do?

No. The civil route we handle in England and the criminal report in the United States are on separate tracks and do not interfere with each other. We encourage IC3 reporting where the case fits, and where a minor is involved the matter goes to law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children immediately. The civil work continues alongside whatever the FBI decides to do, on its own timetable, and we will tell you on the first call which sequence makes sense in your situation.

What does the firm actually see when we look at your evidence?

We see what shape the matter is and where the legal route lies, not whatever the extortionist is threatening to expose. The intimate material is rarely the thing we need to work with. What we work with is the messages, the demands, the payment trail, the platform metadata, and the patterns that point to who the person is behind the account. Our investigators and our solicitors are used to reviewing this material professionally and without commentary, and you decide what is shared with whom. The dignity of how you are treated does not change because of what an extortionist holds.

How do I know the threats will not just continue under a new account?

This is the right question to ask. Once the person behind the account has been identified and served with a court order, what changes is them, not just the account. The order binds the person, not the username, and it forbids them from publishing or sharing the material through any channel. A new account would breach the order in the same way the original account would have, and that breach is enforceable as contempt of court. In practice, an extortionist who has been named and is facing those consequences tends to stop, because the calculation that made the threats worthwhile has changed.