The White House announced a new federal program last week that lets vetted private cybersecurity firms go on offense against transnational criminal networks, including sextortion rings that target children and adults.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) says the move mirrors recommendations the watchdog group brought directly to White House officials during a November 2025 briefing.
“Sextortion rings have operated for years with a devastating advantage: they exploit victims across borders, often out of reach and out of sight,” said Dr. Marcel van der Watt, President and CEO of NCOSE, in a press release. “This program starts to close that gap.”
An estimated one in four minors and one in seven adults experience some form of sextortion, according to Van der Watt. “This is an urgent threat to American lives and even national security,” he said. “By putting America’s private-sector cyber talent to work, under strict federal oversight, the government can move at the necessary speed and scale to disrupt sextortionist infrastructure, protecting victims before more damage is done.”
Related: NCOSE Just Put Mark Zuckerberg on Its 2026 Dirty Dozen List
Movieguide® has tracked NCOSE’s fight against online exploitation for years, from its annual “Dirty Dozen” list naming platforms that enable abuse to its recent push holding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accountable for exploitation happening on his platforms. For families raising kids amid group chats and gaming servers, sextortion isn’t an abstract policy debate. It’s a threat that can show up on a child’s phone through an app parents assumed was safe.
NCOSE says the new program builds on a March executive order President Trump signed, titled “Combating Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against American Citizens,” which directed federal agencies to target cybercrime and sextortion committed by transnational criminal organizations and established a fund to return stolen money to victims. This week’s memorandum goes further, letting bonded private firms conduct surveillance and disruption operations against foreign networks under Justice Department and Homeland Security oversight.
The stakes behind those numbers are grim. The same White House fact sheet notes that one in seven young people who experienced sextortion as a minor reported harming themselves afterward, and Americans lost more than $20.8 billion to cyber-enabled crime in 2025 alone. The administration points to last year’s TAKE IT DOWN Act, which criminalized the spread of non-consensual intimate images and deepfakes and secured its first conviction this past April, as evidence that enforcement is catching up to the crime.
Van der Watt didn’t stop at praising the administration, though. “We additionally call on Congress to take action to prevent our online platforms from facilitating sextortion by passing the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) with a strong duty of care,” he said.
The Senate Commerce Committee advanced KOSA on Aug. 5, sending a bill that already cleared the full Senate 91-3 last Congress back toward a possible floor vote. For Movieguide® readers watching both Washington and their own family’s group chats, NCOSE’s message lands the same way: the tools to fight exploitation are finally catching up, but the fight itself is far from over.
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