NCA Issues Warning to Parents As Shared Child Photos Exploited by AI
The National Crime Agency (NCA) has launched a new campaign to warn parents about the dangers of oversharing videos and photos of their kids.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reported a 26,000% annual increase in AI-generated videos of child sexual abuse in 2025 at 3440, versus just 13 in 2024. It also reported a 14% year-on-year (YoY) increase in AI-generated images and videos in 2025, reaching 8029.
A social media campaign will be run on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, to help parents, carers and others better understand image consent and actions they can take to better protect their children.
It will come alongside new written guidance designed to help parents and carers find safe ways to share images of their children so they don’t fall into the hands of those with malicious intent.
There is also help and advice on how to speak to children and young people about AI and deepfake nudes.
Read more on IWF: New Tool Launched to Remove Nude Images of Children Online
When reviewing image consent for sharing of photography, parents and carers were urged to consider the following:
- Am I still comfortable with how my child’s images might be used?
- Have my preferences changed?
- Do I want to limit or withdraw consent?
- It’s ok to ask people not to post photos or videos of your child online
Oversharing and Explicit Targeting
Parents oversharing content related to their children online (“sharenting”) is a well understood risk which could put videos and images at risk of being fed into AI for child sexual abuse content, or of personal data on their kids being used by fraudsters. But threat actors are also proactively going after content, the IWF warned.
The foundation claimed that criminal gangs had targeted a school in the UK, stealing imagery of the school’s pupils from a school website and, using AI, creating more than 100 sexual images of the children which they tried to blackmail the school with.
“We don’t want to say don’t share your children’s images with the people you love and trust, but we want everyone to be aware of the potential risks and make an informed decision with the full facts at their disposal. These are not hypothetical threats, they are real,” warned IWF CEO, Kerry Smith.
“The impact of this imagery can be devastating. The harms are very real. And the potential for lasting damage is something which I think every parent would do anything they can to prevent. We want to give them back that power, and start a public conversation about whether we should be sharing imagery online as a default.”
The NCA’s Tim Wright argued that prevention is key.
“We encourage parents and carers to take a few simple steps today: review the privacy settings on social media accounts; think carefully about who can access images of their children; and talk openly with family, friends, schools and clubs about image sharing and consent,” he added “Most importantly, if something does go wrong, stay calm, reassure your child that they are not to blame, and report concerns to the police or CEOP so action can be taken as quickly as possible.”
It is not just the number of images/videos created in this way that has rocketed but the seriousness of the content. Two-thirds (65%) was classed as Category A (the most severe), versus 43% of non-AI criminal videos in 2025.
