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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

 Tagged with crime


29 May 2024

Criminals are selling guides on social media on how to carry out sextortion, BBC News has learned.

The guides show people how to pose as young women online, trick a victim into sending sexually explicit material and then blackmail them.

On Tuesday, Olamide Shanu appeared in court in London. He is believed to be part of a gang that made £2m from blackmailing adults and children online.

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27 November 2022

The encouragement of self-harm will be criminalised in an update to the Online Safety Bill, the government has said.

Content that encourages someone to physically harm will be targeted in a new offence, making it illegal.

The government said the changes had been influenced by the case of Molly Russell - the 14-year-old who ended her life in November 2017.

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25 November 2022

A planned new law would make sharing pornographic deepfakes without consent a crime in England and Wales.

Tackling the rise in manipulated images, where a person's face is put on someone else's body, is part of a crackdown on the abuse of intimate pictures in the Online Safety Bill.

This law would also make it easier to charge people with sharing intimate photos without consent.

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20 February 2022

What happened in a Rockville, Maryland, high school this January was a scene all too familiar for police officers across the US. An altercation between two boys ended with a shot ringing out, and a 15-year-old left bleeding on a bathroom floor.

What witnesses to the crime did next, however, shocked even Betsy Brantner Smith, a nearly three-decade law enforcement veteran and spokesperson for the National Police Association.

"The students started tweeting about it," she said. "That's just, unfortunately, the era we live in."

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18 August 2020

Over the past six months Radio 1 Newsbeat has been investigating how social media is being used to sell drugs.

Britain’s most senior police officer when it comes to drugs says social media bosses would do more if it was their children dying from drugs bought this way.

Research suggests one in four young people are now seeing drugs advertised on their social media feeds.

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