# Scams, sextortion and blackmail > Fraud aimed at people looking for a spanking partner: overpayment scams, fake verification sites, catfishing, sextortion and blackmail, and how to report it. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/scams-and-blackmail/ - Section: Safety and practice - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. The rest of the safety writing here is about whether somebody is dangerous to be alone with. This page is about the ones who never intend to meet you at all, because what they want is money and your embarrassment is the lever they use to get it. If somebody already has something of yours, go to the red box. --- ## In short - Any request for gift card codes, cryptocurrency or travel money from somebody you have not met is fraud, and so is a link sent to verify that you are real. - Two checks settle catfishing: a reverse image search, and a live video call where they hold up something you choose in the moment. - Never pay a sextortion demand. Screenshot everything, stop replying, report to the platform and to the police on **101**, and tell one real person. - In England and Wales, blackmail is an offence under the Theft Act 1968, and sharing an intimate image without consent is an offence under the Online Safety Act 2023. Four people have tried it on me over the years, and I am close to the worst target going: a mature man who writes publicly about the thing he is supposed to be ashamed of. A woman with a new profile and any hint that she is finding her feet will get more than four. Whoever is at the other end has no interest in spanking. They have read your profile closely enough to know what you want to hear, and they will say it back to you for as long as it takes. ## Why this corner in particular Blackmail needs somebody with a lot to lose and a strong reason not to tell anyone. A kink profile supplies both in an afternoon. So the ashamed pay. That is the business model, complete. Say the sentence to yourself now, in a calm hour, while nothing is happening: someone is going to try to make money out of my embarrassment. Hearing it in advance takes most of its power away, because the technique needs you too mortified to sit down and do the arithmetic. ## The money patterns The commonest opening is somebody offering to pay you. A generous older gentleman wants to spank a willing adult and sends two hundred pounds up front in good faith. The money arrives and it is real. Then something goes wrong at his end, and could you send eighty of it back. You send the eighty out of your own account, the original payment reverses a week later as fraudulent, and you are eighty pounds down with nobody to complain to. That one is older than the internet and it works because the first transfer feels like proof. Gift cards are cruder. Any request to buy vouchers, photograph the codes and send the photograph is fraud, without exception, because no legitimate transaction anywhere works that way. Cryptocurrency to somebody you have never met is the same thing in a smarter coat. Travel money is the sentimental version: he is coming down from Newcastle, the booking has gone wrong, would you cover the ticket and he will settle up when he arrives. He does not arrive. Then the one that catches careful people, which is everywhere in kink personals and is dressed up as safety. He suggests you both get verified. There is a site, it confirms you are over 18 and not a scammer, it is free, and he will send the link. It looks reasonable. It asks for a card number to prove you are an adult and promises not to charge you, and then something with an unrecognisable name starts taking a monthly payment and the details are sold on. No genuine person sends you a verification link. Where a platform checks ages, it does that inside its own site or app, never through a link from another member. The link is the fraud, and the fact that he framed it as caution is why it gets past people who check everything else. ## Photographs belonging to somebody else Two checks settle nearly every case and both are quick. Reverse image search everything he sends, using [Google Lens](https://lens.google.com/) or [TinEye](https://tineye.com/). Stolen photographs come off a model portfolio, or off some man who has no idea his holiday pictures are being used to talk to women in Derby. The other is a live video call before you agree to anything. Not a recording, and not a photograph of somebody holding today's date, which takes four minutes to fake. Ask him to come on camera now and hold up something you choose on the spot: three fingers, or whatever is nearest on his desk. Anybody real does it without complaint and most of them find it funny. The complaint is the answer. A man who has written to you every evening for a month and cannot manage five minutes on camera has told you what you need to know, and the reason he gives will be an excellent one. ## Sextortion, as a sequence In order, because people recognise a shape far more readily than they recognise advice, and this one runs the same way almost every time. 1. Warmth arriving faster than the facts could support it. Replies in seconds at odd hours, none of the interruptions of a person with a job and a Tuesday. 2. A move off the platform, early. Anywhere without a report button or a history somebody could check. 3. An image, asked for gently, often after they have sent one first so that it feels like an exchange. 4. The turn. A figure, a deadline, and a screenshot of your friends list or your employer's website to show you they have done their research. The gap between the first message and the turn can be two days or six weeks. Longer is not safer. Longer means somebody decided you were worth more patience. > **If it is happening now.** Stop replying mid-conversation. No final message, no explanation, no request for more time. Do not pay and do not send anything further. Screenshot all of it first, including the profile, the username, the link to the account and the whole conversation, and keep a copy off your phone. > > > > Then block and report on the platform, report to the police on **101**, or **999** if you are frightened for your safety, and report the fraud to [Report Fraud](https://www.reportfraud.police.uk), which replaced Action Fraud. If an intimate image exists, the [Revenge Porn Helpline](https://revengepornhelpline.org.uk), run by SWGfL, gets adult content taken down, and the same organisation runs [StopNCII.org](https://stopncii.org), which fingerprints an image on your own device so participating platforms can block it being uploaded. > > > > Then tell one real person tonight. Paying escalates it, every single time, because the payment identifies you as somebody who pays. ## When the person is real An ex, or somebody you played with twice and stopped seeing, who now mentions that your employer would find your photographs interesting. Everything above assumes a stranger working at scale who moves on once you stop responding. A real person does not move on. It is also a crime, which surprises people. Blackmail is an offence under the Theft Act 1968 in England and Wales, and it does not stop being one because the material is embarrassing or because you sent it willingly. Sharing an intimate image without consent is an offence under the Online Safety Act 2023, and where there is a wider pattern of control around it, section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 covers [coercive behaviour](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/consent-and-coercive-control/). I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. You do not need to know which offence it is in order to ring 101 and describe what happened. ## The thing nobody says out loud Here is what I would want somebody to say to me at two in the morning. Being outed as a spanko is survivable. It is horrible, it is a few bad weeks, some people are odd with you and then get bored, and the person you are most frightened of telling has almost certainly got something of their own. Being on the hook to a blackmailer is not survivable in the same way. It runs for months, it costs money you do not have, it makes you lie to people who love you, and it moves in permanently. Almost everybody who pays is protecting a version of their life that would have come through the disclosure intact. I watched somebody do it and did not work out what was happening for six weeks, because he kept it light and made jokes about a woman on the internet and I took the jokes at face value. He had paid twice by then. I should have asked a direct question in the first fortnight instead of waiting to be told. ## The fraud with no money in it More common than the financial kind. The experienced dom of twenty years who has never done any of it. Two decades of claimed practice and not one name of a person you could write to. References arriving as screenshots from accounts created last month. A club in a nearby city with no listing, no event and nobody who has heard of it. A man who says several women will vouch for him and cannot produce one. The question fits in a line: who is somebody I could message about you? Anyone with a history gives you a name in seconds, because they have been asked before and expected it. Anyone without one gives you an explanation, and the explanations are often very good. It is their length that tells you. What to do with a name once you have it is at [vetting a partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/vetting-a-partner/). ## What prevents nearly all of it - A separate email address with none of your name in it, used for this and nothing else. - No real name and no employer until you have met the person and decided. - Your face and anything identifying kept out of the same photograph: no tattoo, no distinctive ring, no recognisable window, no post on the table. - Nothing sent that you would mind a stranger holding. I would rather you sent nothing, and I know people do. - Meet in public, and no money to anybody you have not met in person. That includes loans, and receiving money to pass on for somebody, which makes you a money mule and is an offence in itself. Each of those costs you a little atmosphere and nothing else. And the part that does more work than the list: anyone genuine accepts every item without argument, because they have the same problem and have thought about it already. Somebody who talks you down on one of them, warmly and with a good explanation, has answered the question you were asking. ## How common this is I do not know, and I would rather say so than round it up. There are no figures for the kink end of this specifically, national fraud reporting does not break the numbers out that way, and most of it goes unreported because reporting means saying the word spanking to a stranger. Treat the ordering above as impression rather than measurement. The verification link is the one I hear about most, and it is the only one on this page I have come close to falling for myself. > ### If this has got on top of you > > > > Samaritans are on **116 123**, free, any hour, and you do not have to be in crisis to ring. People have taken their own lives over sextortion, so I will be blunt: there is nothing that could be posted about you that is worth that, and other people forget far faster than you can believe from inside the panic. > > > > If tonight feels unmanageable, ring them before you do anything else. If the person doing this is a partner or an ex, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is **0808 2000 247**, free and 24 hours. ## Read next - [Vetting a partner](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/vetting-a-partner/) - [Red flags](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/red-flags/) - [Photographs and video](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/photographs-and-video/) - [Fiction: the man who was not there](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-man-who-was-not-there/) ## Common questions ### Someone is threatening to send my spanking photos to my husband unless I pay. What do I do? Stop replying now, do not pay anything, and do not delete the conversation. Screenshot the profile, the username, the link to the account and the whole exchange first, then block and report on the platform. Report it to the police on 101, report the fraud to Report Fraud (reportfraud.police.uk), and contact the Revenge Porn Helpline, which is the UK service that gets adult intimate images taken down. Paying tells them you are a person who pays, and the demands carry on. ### He wants me to verify my age on a site before we meet. Is that a scam? Almost certainly. Nobody genuine will ask you to prove yourself through a link they send you. Where a platform checks ages, it does that inside its own site or app, never through a link from another member. The sites behind those links exist to collect card details, and they take a recurring payment under a name you will not recognise on your statement. If somebody sends you a verification link, that link is the scam. ### He has messaged me for weeks but will not do a video call. Does that mean he is fake? It means you have no evidence he is who he says he is, and after weeks of daily messages that absence is itself the information. Anybody real will come on camera for five minutes and hold up something you pick in the moment, and most of them find the request reasonable. A refusal always arrives with a good reason attached, which is exactly why it works. Do not meet, send anything or move money until you have seen and heard the person live.