Snapchat is rolling out new safety tools aimed at protecting teens from sextortion

Snapchat is working to make it harder for teenagers to be contacted on the app by people they don’t know, its latest effort to stop the sexual and financial exploitation scam known as sextortion.

Snapchat is working to make it harder for teenagers to be contacted on the app by people they don’t know, its latest effort to stop the sexual and financial exploitation scam known as sextortion. The company on Tuesday announced a set of new safety features, including expanded warning pop-ups that appear when a teen receives a message from someone they don’t share mutual friends with or have in their contacts. Now, teens will also receive a warning message if they receive a chat from a user who has been blocked or reported by others or who is from a region where the teen’s other contacts aren’t located, “signs that the person may be a scammer,” Snapchat said in a blog post Tuesday. And Snapchat will now prevent the delivery of friend requests for teens to or from an account that they don’t share mutual friends with that is also located in regions often associated with scammers. In addition to expanding Snapchat’s broader suite of youth safety measures, the new features are aimed specifically at preventing financial sextortion, a worrying and growing type of scam across social media where bad actors gain the trust of young users, convince them to send sexual or explicit photos and then demand payment in exchange for keeping the pictures a secret. “These features were designed to better protect teens from potential online harms and to enhance the real-friend connections that make Snapchat so unique,” Snap’s Global Head of Platform Safety Jacqueline Beauchere said in an exclusive statement to CNN ahead of the announcement. Law enforcement officials have in recent years warned of an uptick in online sextortion scams, in which bad actors, typically located overseas, target children and teens, often with profiles that appear to belong to friendly fellow teenagers. In some cases, sextortion has resulted in suicides.