By Alice Driver
TUCSON – This spring, the mother of a high school student in Tucson, Arizona, called her daughter’s school to report online messages sent to her daughter, threatening to share nude pictures of her with other kids at school. The mom did not know at the time that the pictures were not real images, but rather AI-generated sexual content.
Both mother and daughter asked to be identified by pseudonyms. The Beam is withholding other identifying details.
The threatening messages began three days earlier, when the daughter, who we are identifying as Jennifer, was waiting for the school bus. A new message popped up on her phone from an unknown sender.
“Hey,” wrote someone called “Leo,” whose profile picture looked like a teen girl. Jennifer did not respond immediately and boarded the bus. Later that day, Jennifer got a second message from Leo asking whether they could be friends.
The message came on a free messaging app called GroupMe, which Jennifer had joined to communicate with other volunteers at an after-school program.
Jennifer eventually responded, and the two began chatting. Soon, according to a Tucson Police Department incident report, “Leo messaged saying that [Jennifer] needed to send her $150 or else [Leo] would send a nude picture of her to her whole school.” But Jennifer had never sent Leo a nude photo.
Jennifer did not respond to the threat and did not know what to do.
Jennifer had become a victim of financial extortion involving AI-generated nude imagery, an increasingly common crime targeting U.S. teens, including in Arizona. Although sextortion is not new, generative AI allows offenders to create images faster, with less effort and at scale.
About 2.3 million public high school students in the 2023-24 school year said they knew of AI-generated nude images depicting other students at their school, according to a report from the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights and freedom of expression. Beyond financial harm, sextortion involving deepfake nudes can cause severe, lasting emotional and psychological harm.
The FBI and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) received more than 13,000 reports of online financial sextortion of minors nationwide from October 2021 and March 2023; the crimes were linked to at least 20 suicides.
Arizona does not require public schools to teach specifically about sextortion, AI-generated intimate imagery or AI-facilitated image abuse, leaving individual districts to decide whether and how to address these topics. Because sextortion often involves sexual images, requests for nude photos, coercion and exploitation, some schools may consider educational efforts as sexuality-related instruction requiring parental permission.
Child-safety advocates say the opt-in requirement creates a barrier because many students encounter online exploitation, AI-generated imagery or sextortion before receiving prevention instruction.
“In the digital age, kids desperately need support to navigate tech-enabled harassment, and schools hold important power to help curb these harms,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, president and CEO of Center for Democracy & Technology, in a statement accompanying the 2024 report.
The Beam asked the Arizona Department of Education about statewide sex education and digital safety. The department replied, “Arizona is a local control state, so it is a decision that each district makes as to how they can best address online safety issues in their local community. ADE does not interact with district technology teams regarding their online security initiatives.”
Jennifer Anderson, executive assistant to the superintendent and school board at Amphitheater Public Schools, where Jennifer was a student this spring, said the district follows statewide laws related to protecting students from online threats.
“Amphitheater Public Schools, like all Arizona public schools, is subject to academic standards, requirements, and mandates that cover digital safety, cyberbullying, and digital citizenship.” The district also provides online resources on “cyberbullying and digital drama” for students and parents.
“While the state mandates broad education and strict policies regarding student online behavior, highly specific terms like ‘sextortion’ are not explicitly itemized in the state’s academic standards,” Anderson said.
Jennifer told The Beam that she had not received instruction or prevention information about AI-generated imagery or sextortion at her high school before receiving the threat.
“It has not entered into any of the classes I have taken.”
AI increases the scale of the crime
Sextortion is not new. For decades, perpetrators have used fake identities, romance scams and threats involving nude imagery to extort victims online. But experts say AI-generated nude imagery and deepfake technology have dramatically increased the scale of the crime.
Perpetrators often take photos from social media and use “nudify” apps to digitally undress the subjects of the photos and turn the images into realistic nudes.
Nudify apps are widely available. A January 2026 study from the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit focused on holding large technology companies accountable, identified more than 100 nudify apps across Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
These apps do more than create nude images. A 2024 study evaluated 20 popular, easy-to-find nudify apps and found most allowed users to direct the AI to expose specific body parts; half allowed users to depict the subject in a sexually explicit activity without consent.
The apps did not consistently address privacy and consent in their terms of service, researchers found. Only half said users should obtain consent from the person depicted, but not all required users to affirm that consent. A 2025 report from Stanford University’s Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence found that many apps do not prohibit users from uploading images of minors.
Stopping the spread of these apps is not easy. Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, described efforts to report and remove nudify apps as “kind of a whack-a-mole.” Some, she warned, are “gonna slip through the cracks because nudify apps are very canny about hiding themselves and their true purpose.”
AI-generated nude images also make sextortion cheap and lucrative. Sextortionists often request small payments – $50, $100, $200 – in quick succession, said Amanda Goharian, director of research and insights at Thorn, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation online.
“It’s not pig butchering in that sense of like there being a whale at the end, but if it only takes you 15 minutes to get to a point where you’ve gotten 500 bucks, that’s pretty lucrative if you just kind of scale that,” she added.
Sgt. Lorence Jove supervises the Tucson Police Department’s Internet Crimes Against Children Unit, which investigated Jennifer’s case. “They’re not gonna stop. If you send them $100 or $100,000, they’re gonna keep asking you, keep pressuring you, keep threatening you until you realize it’s never gonna end.”
Victims “are young, bright, intelligent children that have plenty to live for. They’re captains of football teams, they’re graduating, they’re [getting] scholarships to major colleges,” he added. They may have their own money and, in some cases, access to their parents’ bank accounts to send payments.
Tucson police are seeing an uptick in cases like Jennifer’s.
The school’s response
Few schools have policies and procedures that address the creation and spread of authentic or deepfake nonconsensual nude or sexual imagery, according to the Center for Democracy & Technology’s 2024 report “In Deep Trouble: Surfacing Tech Powered Sexual Harassment in Schools.” Without policies, schools can respond only after an incident has occurred.
That can leave students and parents in the dark and looking ill-equipped schools for answers.
When she called her daughter’s school last spring, Jennifer’s mother said, staff told her to call 911.
Two Tucson police officers arrived at the school to interview Jennifer. They advised her to delete any explicit images Leo had sent and confirmed that Jennifer “did not want to hurt herself due to this incident.”
Tucson police believed the scammer was likely overseas and told Jennifer and her mother to report the incident to the FBI or HSI if they wanted more than documentation and advocacy.
Most sextortion cases end in “a dead end with a [virtual phone] number or dead-end email. And that is part of the reason this is so dangerous,” Sgt. Jove said.
The Beam requested district records about the incident, which brought police to the school and led to a meeting between Jennifer and the principal. The district said it had no responsive records.
Amphitheater Superintendent Todd Jaeger told The Beam the district had no records of a “sextortion” matter “because there was no such school-related matter.”
“The fact that an individual, even if a student, may have been involved in such a situation external to the school setting does not mean the school will have any record of it. We typically do not have or maintain records of a student’s private events that occur in their lives, nor are we typically involved in every single matter that may occur in a student’s life, particularly if those events are not affiliated with the school or the student’s enrollment in any way,” he added.
The school did not offer Jennifer counseling. After the incident, Jennifer said, “The school did not do anything about it. None of the assistant principals ever talked to me about it after that.”
Jennifer was racked with shame and guilt. Experts say such feelings are common among victims and contribute to underreporting.
“It was kind of my fault that it happened because I responded,” Jennifer told The Beam.
“No, it’s not your fault,” her mom reassured her.
“But I responded,” said her daughter.
How schools are addressing the problem
Many school districts still view AI primarily as a tool students use to cheat – not a source of harm, according to Stanford research fellow Pfefferkorn. Many districts remain unaware of the risks posed by nudify apps and sextortion, she said, and have not developed policies to address them.
Schools seeking to teach students about these risks are struggling to develop effective approaches, said Pima County School Superintendent Dustin Williams.
“This is a massive gap that I see in our educational system, that there’s very little clarity on how to deliver this,” Williams said.
To address the gap, Williams partnered with Power Over Predators through the Pima County School Superintendent’s Office. This Arizona-based program provides instruction on internet safety, cyberbullying, sexting, online exploitation, trafficking prevention and healthy relationships for middle and high school students.
Parents must sign an opt-in form before students can receive the sexuality-related instruction.
Williams said the partnership is intended to give schools a scalable prevention model while complying with Arizona’s parental-rights requirements.
Police are also helping to fill the gap in some districts. Sgt. Jove said Tucson police regularly conduct digital safety training for students and school staff.
“We’re at safety days. We are teaching at schools, middle schools, high schools. We’re teaching staff at schools,” Sgt. Jove said, adding that informed students can watch out for other kids who might be victims and encourage them to seek help.
The Beam asked Amphitheater whether it partners with outside groups to provide training on digital safety and online threats, including sextortion.
“Amphitheater does not currently have any established partnerships with any of the local law enforcement agencies where they are providing training or materials for use with students,” Anderson wrote in an email.
Some advocates say sextortion prevention should be treated as a digital safety issue rather than solely a sex education issue. Under that framework, instruction about AI-generated imagery, online coercion, extortion scams and reporting mechanisms could be provided to all students regardless of whether their parents opt in to sex education.
Digital safety and online ethical behavior are requirements in the Arizona Department of Education’s technology standards.
One district’s handbook addresses AI-generated imagery
Alison Macklin, director of public affairs at the nonprofit Sex Ed for Social Change (SIECUS), said administrators and teachers often face a hostile environment for teaching sex education, including sextortion prevention.
“I think that because of that word sex again, you know, school districts are kind of like, we’re just not gonna touch it,” she said. “Even though there’s research and evidence that shows that sex education should be comprehensive.”
Some schools are finding avenues to address AI-generated sexual content and sextortion risks outside the sex education debate and inside the broader conversation around digital safety.
Agua Fria Union High School District in Avondale, Arizona, is taking that approach by revising its student handbook to address acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI-generated imagery and sexually explicit content.
According to Luke Allpress, the district’s director of innovative solutions, the changes were prompted by incidents in which students and staff members had been harassed with AI-generated imagery, although the images were not sexual.
“I’ve had situations already of putting a staff member’s face on a non-sexually explicit video and sharing it without their consent,” he said. “We want to have language that covers that.”
The new handbook states that students may not use AI or other technology to:
- create or share altered, deceptive or synthetic images, audio or video of another person without consent;
- create or distribute humiliating, harassing, threatening, sexually explicit or false content; and
- impersonate students, staff or others.
Allpress said the district was educating administrators and staff about nudify apps and providing resources “to make sure that the folks at the front lines doing the hard work with students in their offices are prepared.”
The district’s school board approved the handbook. Students will receive it and be asked to sign it in August.
A potential legislative response
Some child-safety advocates argue that Arizona should establish a statewide expectation for prevention education on sexual exploitation, giving schools a framework to teach students to recognize grooming, coercion and exploitation before abuse occurs.
Some advocates point to Erin’s Law as a legislative response. Named for childhood sexual assault survivor Erin Merryn, it would require public schools to provide child sexual abuse prevention education to help children recognize abuse, grooming and boundary violations. Such instruction could open the door to age-appropriate lessons on AI-generated sexual imagery and sextortion.
Power Over Predators founder Lisa Hansen has spent years urging Arizona to adopt Erin’s Law. The organization teaches middle and high school students to identify, avoid and report abuse, online threats and sex trafficking.
“Erin’s Law would be fabulous,” Hansen said. “So when kids are awakened to what predatory behavior looks like, and they’re like, ‘Okay, that’s happening to me right now,’ is when you have the opportunity to help that child advocate for themselves or literally get help if they need it.”
As of January 2023, 38 states had enacted versions of the law, according to the nonprofit that promotes it. Arizona has not enacted similar legislation despite efforts in 2018 and 2025, including Senate Bill 1528 and House Bill 2797. The bills would have required sexual abuse and assault awareness and prevention education, teacher training and standardized reporting procedures in Arizona public schools.
“It’s actually the most difficult work to accomplish anywhere,” Hansen said. “And I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and it has been a constant battle.”
In the meantime, Hansen said Power Over Predators is partnering with technology firms Harm Block and ProxyWare on a pilot program in five Maricopa County schools. The effort combines classroom education about online exploitation with digital monitoring and filtering tools intended to help prevent students from accessing or sharing harmful content. Organizers hope the pilot will generate data about the nature and frequency of online incidents of sexual exploitation and sextortion to guide broader adoption across Arizona schools.
Weeks after the incident, Jennifer said she did not plan to return to school because it was “very overwhelming and very hard to go back to school and to focus on school.”
“Honestly, the biggest thing to do is call the police and tell your parents and communicate with them on it,” Jennifer said, reflecting on her experience with online sextortion.
“It’s never really talked about at schools,” Jennifer said, adding that she hoped sharing her story would help change that.