It’s happened to most of us.

You open your Facebook account to discover a friend request from a stranger with a suspiciously attractive profile picture. Their profiles are barren, save for a few more provocative shots of themselves in various states of undress.

The profiles are fake. The photos are a front. And in many cases, the people behind the accounts are online con-artists trying to get you to drop your pants.

They call it ‘sexploitation’ – fraudsters tricking people into sending them explicit photos or videos of themselves, only to then use the footage as blackmail - and it’s one of the cyber crimes that lawmakers and police are struggling to keep up with.

Cyber Crime Unit Inspector Timothy Zammit told Times Talk yesterday that police deal with an average of one or two sexploitation cases a week. 

In many cases, victims are first befriended by attractive strangers on social media sites such as Facebook. They're then lured into webcam chats and tricked into exposing themselves, only to then be told that the footage will be sent to their friends and family unless they pay up.

The amounts extorted varied. “Sometimes they start off by demanding thousands and then negotiate down. But victims should never fork out money, because there’s no guarantee [demands] will stop,” Inspector Zammit said.

The Cyber Crime Unit has been dealing with sexploitation cases for the past few years, with reports of an Africa-based criminal ring targeting Maltese people for sexploitation emerging back in 2014.

Police consider the problem to be so widespread – and so difficult to stop - that they have promoted a video warning people about online strangers on their official Facebook page.

In most local cases, victims tend to be male. That contrasts with research into sexploitation carried out by the US-based Brookings Institution, which found that virtually all reported adult victims of sexploitation were female.

The Brookings Institution study also revealed how a few perpetrators could have an outsized web of victims: the 78 perpetrators it identified were responsible for almost 1,400 cases of sexploitation.

“It used to be that you couldn’t walk into a place and sexually assault a large number of people,” Brookings academic and author of the study Benjamin Wittes told the New York Times. But a computer changes that.

The sheer number of victims one perpetrator can 'sexploit', coupled with the fact that perpetrators can be thousands of miles away, makes it especially difficult for police to stem the tide of sexploitation cases. 

Reliable data on sexploitation and its prosecution remains elusive, in part because of a lack of legislation protecting against it, and partly due to suspected under-reporting of the crime, as victims are shamed into paying up rather than turning to the authorities.

Law enforcement is particularly concerned about the dangers sextortion poses to minors. The Brookings Institute study found that a minor was involved in almost 90 per cent of cases it examined, and the US Justice Department last month declared sextortion “by far the most significant growing threat to children.”

The local Cyber Crime Unit’s workload has increased almost exponentially over the past decade. In 2003 it handled just 51 cases. By 2013 that figure had risen to 616.

Of those, an average of 20 cases a year are related to child pornography.

 Have you been the victim of a cyber crime? Tell us your story at mynews@timesofmalta.com. All stories will be treated in the strictest confidence.