As college athletes become bigger targets for sexual exploitation online, the NCAA and FBI announced a partnership Monday to educate athletes on how to prevent private images from falling into the wrong hands.
Financial name, image and likeness deals have increased the online public presence of college athletes, making them desirable victims for criminals, an FBI cyber expert said during a media call.
“Student-athletes maintain large public-facing social media followings and in many cases expanded further by name, image and likeness activity,” FBI cyber division Section Chief Taushiana Bright said. “That visibility increases both their exposure to targeting and the leverage an offender believes they hold when threatening to expose an athlete to a coach, team, school or sponsor.”
Bad actors obtain private images of athletes by conning them and by hacking into personal accounts to steal content. Images and videos are then used to extort athletes under threat of having the images made public.
The FBI and NCAA are calling on coaches and athletic department leadership and compliance staff to help educate athletes about sexual exploitation, as “they may be the first trusted adults an athlete would turn to,” the FBI said in a statement. Through the partnership, the organizations plan to educate athletes on how to prevent exploitation and give them access to law enforcement, specific tools to report possible criminal behavior, victim services and mental health treatment.
NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan said the NCAA “grieves the sexual exploitation of young men and young women, including college athletes.”
“The criminal behaviors we talk about here, like stealing explicit images and using them for financial gain, are sickening,” he said. “Tragic as those acts are, we know they occur and more often than anyone would like.”
College athletes recently have been the subject of a number of alleged incidents involving stolen photos and data. Former Baltimore Ravens and University of Michigan assistant football coach Matt Weiss is the subject of an ongoing federal criminal case, facing two dozen counts of hacking and identity theft after he allegedly stole private videos and photos from more than 3,300 people, mostly female athletes, over an about eight-year period.
In 2022, court records revealed that at least two male athletes at Penn State had been the victims of sexual extortion by a woman who met one of them on a dating app. Videos included images of athletes undressing in the Penn State football locker room. The Penn State university police investigation found that the woman had done the same thing to athletes in several other states.
Last year, ESPN published a story about Jordan DeMay, a high school football and basketball player from Marquette, Michigan, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2022 after a ring of online scammers threatened to expose explicit photos of him if he didn’t pay them more than $1,000.
In a public service announcement released Monday, the FBI said “sexual exploitation actors” often employ three tactics: targeting passwords and PINs, sending false messages stating that a person’s social media account has been disabled, and using phishing schemes impersonating social media customer support saying there has been a new login to a person’s account.
Once hackers steal images, they post or sell them — along with the individual’s personal information — on criminal marketplaces, which can lead to harassment, sextortion, stalking or even bad actors advertising the stolen content on the victim’s own social media page. Bad actors sometimes ask the victim for money or additional photos.
Sexually explicit images of athletes made available online are mostly real and not AI-generated, Bright said. Although AI-generated images have increased reports of online sexual exploitation overall, Bright said they aren’t as prevalent in cases involving athletes. She said sometimes perpetrators will post a stock photo from their team site to prove that it is the same person in the explicit photos or videos for sale.
Though neither the NCAA nor FBI had specific numbers of college athletes who had reported being the victims of sextortion, Bright said that in 2025, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 75,000 submissions regarding sextortion. About 25 years ago, the center received “a few thousand complaints per month,” compared with last year when it averaged almost 3,000 per day, she said.
The FBI statement offered a variety of tips on how athletes — or anyone — can protect themselves, including avoiding storing sensitive images or videos on social media or internet-accessible sites, using hard-to-guess passwords and unique PIN and multifactor authentication, being cautious about clicking on links in emails, and not sharing login information with anyone.
If a person has a concern about account security, the statement advises users to go directly to the service’s website or official app to change login information if necessary.
The FBI also offered a website to report possible stolen content or threats, where users will be asked to provide information about stolen content; whether a user has received threats, attempts at extortion or other forms of harassment; and what actions, if any, a user has already taken to address the concern.
