Sextortion (732A/23)
Request
- Between September 2015 to the present day, what was the total number of sextortion online (ST) cases reported?
2. For each recorded incident please provide the following details: victim age, victim gender, and crime outcome where possible.
3. Can you confirm whether any of the cases involved ‘deepfakes’?
CLARIFICATION
I can confirm that in my request I am referring to offences of Disclose Private Sexual Photographs and Films with Intent to Cause Distress which occurred online. I mean both email and online.
To make it easier, I would like to alter my request to the years 2020 until the present day if that is possible.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached for questions 1 and 2). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
Please note that in relation to some records the date of birth has been inputted incorrectly, resulting in the age being wrong on our system.
In relation to question 3 – we have searched for ‘deepfake/s’ and found no records.
REASON FOR DECISION
Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). We have provided data in relation to online crime but cannot identify if any of these are via email. The only way we could do this would be to read each crime report, and as there are 1608 reports this would take 134 hours at 5 minutes per record and would exceed the FOI time limit.
The cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.