July 13, 2026
Deepfake sextortion forces schools to remove student photos from websites
Criminals are manipulating pictures found on school websites and social media to create sexually explicit images
By Sean McCormack
1 min read
AI, Family and Parenting, Privacy
Schools love a good photo, whether it's from a trip to a castle, a science prize ceremony, or sports day shot from three angles. For two decades, celebratory images like these have gone straight onto school websites, captioned with a name and a grade. But those days are gone, because it's the internet in 2026 and we can't have nice things.
As first reported by the Guardian (link below), experts are now urging schools to take those pictures down. According to the Internet Watch Foundation and an advisory body called the Early Warning Working Group (EWWG), blackmailers have been scraping ordinary school photos, feeding them through AI deepfake tools to manufacture child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and demanding payment to keep the images offline.
How we got here
This threat didn't appear overnight; it's an evolution of a long-time threat: sextortion, when someone uses intimate images to blackmail you. Traditionally, sextortion relied on real intimate images that were stolen or shared, but deepfake AI has changed everything.
What happens next
We anticipate a race between regulators and AI-enabled cybercriminals. Right now, attackers still have to manually find the photos themselves. The concern is that this process could soon become automated, allowing criminals to scrape names and photos from school websites and social media platforms at scale.
For parents, the simplest protection may be limiting how many identifiable pictures of your children are available online. That includes being vigilant not just with your child's school, but their sports clubs, extracurricular activities, and social media accounts.
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