Inside the Dark Market Selling Stolen College Athlete Photos

The FBI and NCAA launched a joint effort to protect college athletes from online sexual exploitation and sextortion, a threat that has grown alongside the visibility athletes gained through name image and likeness deals.

Criminals hack personal accounts to steal private photographs and also use artificial intelligence to fabricate sexual images of athletes, then demand money or more material to keep the content offline.

Sources describe an online market where buyers order images of specific athletes, often wearing their university team gear, and pay more for photos involving multiple players from the same team.

FBI cyber crime section chief Taushiana Bright said attackers reach victims through password guessing, fake social media support messages and phishing, and many athletes learn their content was stolen only long afterward.

The scale is national rather than niche, with the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center receiving more than 75,000 sextortion reports in 2025 and losses above 44 million dollars.

The NCAA is not investigating and instead serves as an educator and liaison, using existing relationships with campus administrators and coaches to help athletes report crimes they may hesitate to bring to law enforcement directly.

Officials said the case against former Michigan assistant coach Matt Weiss, who pleaded not guilty to charges involving the accounts of more than 3,300 people, was not the catalyst for the collaboration.