Online crime is ‘through the roof’ in Idaho — with kids often the target

Editor’s note: This story discusses the sexual exploitation of children.

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) – In January, a special education assistant at Boise’s Valley View Elementary was accused of producing child pornography and sexually exploiting students. He took his own life during an attempted arrest.

The incident rattled the community — and for Boise City Council Member Colin Nash, it felt personal. His wife teaches at Valley View, and his children attend the school.

Though he has advocated for adding more traffic safety officers to the Boise Police Department’s force, he told City Council members that month that a conversation with officers about their resources for fighting online crime had made his other policing priorities “fall away.”

“The (ways) crimes are committed and investigated are very different today than they were 20 years ago, and we need to make sure that our institutions are keeping up with this,” Nash told the council. Even as violent crime has dropped in Boise, the department reported, crimes committed online are “going up through the roof,” he said.

It’s a concern that’s been top of mind for Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador’s office, which has an Internet Crimes Against Children unit responsible for investigating tips from a national tipline of child sexual exploitation incidents. The number of tips Idaho received in 2024 was 40% higher than in the previous year, according to data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which serves as a clearinghouse for these tips.

Those tips include cases of people possessing, sharing or producing child pornography, or — increasingly frequently — “sextortion,” Jeff Nye, the chief of the criminal law division in Labrador’s office, told the Idaho Statesman in February. With sextortion, predators trick children, often teen boys, into sending sexual photos, and then use the pictures as blackmail.

It’s difficult to say why the number of cyber tips in Idaho has increased, but there is “every indication” that “this is not going to slow down,” Nye said. He said an April conference held by the national center would likely provide more insight into the drivers, but Labrador’s office did not respond in May to requests for comment on those findings.

Detective Ted Ni, a Boise police officer who works for the attorney general’s internet crimes unit, attributed the increase to the state’s population growth.

The national center receives the tips from social media platforms and other electronic service providers. It refers the vast majority of tips it receives to law enforcement in other countries, where much of such content originates, but it refers domestic tips to state law enforcement agencies.

Labrador’s office takes on the lion’s share of investigating the tips and, in recent years, has streamlined its process to partner with local law enforcement to conduct arrests. In Boise, there is one detective whose salary is paid by the attorney general’s task force; he works full time — alongside the department’s special victims unit detectives — to investigate tips on child sexual exploitation. This kind of partnership, Nye said, helped the office clear a backlog of over 1,000 such tips from before Labrador took office.

The national center has refined its approach to disseminating the tips: It takes more time to verify their authenticity before sending them on to states to investigate, said Nick Edwards, the commander of the attorney general’s internet crimes task force. In 2024, the center began to “bundle” reports of related content to reduce redundant tips, according to its website.

Even with these changes, the number of tips referred to Idaho jumped from about 2,800 in 2023 to about 3,900 in 2024. The national center does not list state-specific data on its website for years before 2023, and it did not respond to a request for comment about Idaho data.

“The alarming thing about this to me, in my mind, is that NCMEC is actually doing a better job of triaging before they send it to us,” Edwards told the Statesman.

Idaho receives fewer tips than most other states, according to the center’s data: In 2024, by comparison, Utah received about 7,000 such referrals from the national center, Oregon received about 11,000, and Washington received about 15,000.

‘Don’t get in the white van’ online, Boise detective advises

Boise — and cities and states across the country — are also seeing a spike in online fraud and scams, said Brad Thorne, a financial crimes detective with the Boise Police Department. The frequency of such scams accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were stuck at home and spent more time online.

“It became a target-rich environment,” Thorne told the Statesman. ‘When I was young, it was like, ‘Don’t get in the white van parked at playgrounds.’ Well, bad actors go where people are, and people are online.”

Online financial scams have only become more organized in the years since, with entire compounds cropping up overseas devoted to luring people in and convincing them to pay up, often sacrificing their life savings in the process, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Boise police have worked to increase public awareness of these scams. Thorne publicizes scams he encounters on a department Facebook page, and the city has encouraged residents to talk more openly with family members about the danger of scams. Often, people who fall prey to scams don’t want to admit they could have been fooled — but that shame can in turn keep others in the dark.

“There’s just a shame factor that we can’t get over,” Thorne said. “People don’t want to come forward because of that embarrassment.”