When Jeff Bezos went public with his accusations of blackmail against the National Enquirer on Thursday, he was hailed by many online for his courage. In a post on Medium, the Amazon CEO alleged that Enquirer representatives threatened to publish intimate photos of him unless he stopped an investigation into the tabloid’s reporting on him. Bezos refused. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion,” he wrote, “how many people can?”

Instantly, Bezos became the most famous and powerful person to claim to be a victim of sextortion, the term often used to describe cases of extortion using intimate or sexually explicit photographs or videos. And experts quickly came out in praise of him for the way he handled the situation, calling it a “textbook” example of how best to respond to extortion.

But Bezos operated from a particularly privileged stance. Factors like age and knowledge of legislation and laws regarding sextortion affect a person’s ability to report sextortion and weather the fallout.

Who Gets Sextorted

Loosely defined, sextortion is when someone threatens to share intimate images of a person against their will—usually by text or on social media, or even on a webpage set up just for them—in exchange for a payout. It’s different from revenge porn, where the aggressor shares the images just to be cruel.

There’s no federal law against sextortion. It’s also not tracked as a single crime, like, say, murder, which makes it difficult to collect data about the act. Compounding the data collection problem is that many victims don’t report that it happened to them, according to experts WIRED spoke with. As with many intimate and domestic violence issues, victims often don’t speak out for fear of being treated like they did something wrong.

Researchers with the Brookings Institute and Lawfareblog attempted to quantify the problem in 2016 by tracking criminal cases—finding 78 total nationwide—and found that the phenomenon was not just underreported but also “dramatically understudied.”

“While [sextortion is] an acknowledged problem both within law enforcement and among private advocates, no government agency maintains data on its prevalence; no private advocacy group does either,” the authors wrote, calling the cases they unearthed “the tip of a very large iceberg.”

“This stuff is wildly under prosecuted,” says Leigh Honeywell, a former ACLU technologist and cofounder and CEO of TallPoppy, a company that helps companies assist employees who have been victims of sexual harassment.

The government does, however, seem to acknowledge it’s a problem. Last year, the US attorney general’s office created a Cyber-Digital Task Force to assess how well law enforcement was addressing cyber threats. In a July report, the task force concluded that sextortion and related nonconsensual pornography “may merit a federal response,” owing to the “increasingly expansive nature of these crimes, in addition to the use of new technologies.”

Most academic research of sextortion focuses on teenagers, who experts say are common victims. Their youth, inexperience, and dependence on adults makes them uniquely vulnerable, and puts them at a serious disadvantage to deal with sextortion in the way a powerful adult might.

In a study published last fall, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire professor of criminal justice Justin Patchin surveyed a nationally representative sample of teenagers in the US and found that 5 percent admitted to being the victim of sextortion, and 3 percent said they’d committed it themselves. A 2018 Pew survey of teen cyberbullying found that 7 percent report having had images of them shared without their consent. The FBI in 2016 wrote that sextortion of minors “has become a major threat in recent years.”