02/06/2026
Deepfake sextortion forces schools to remove student photos from websites.
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, experts are now urging schools to take those pictures down. According to the UK’s National Crime Agency, 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.
