Cybertip

A panicked 14-year-old from British Columbia and his family paid $1,500 to a company that claimed it would recover intimate images that were being used to extort him. It didn't.

The mass shift online brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a boom of so-called "sextortion scams," new data from Statistics Canada suggests.

New statistics show that police-reported extortion cases in Canada rose by nearly 300 per cent in the last decade, as the crime swelled online during the COVID-19 pandemic.