What percentage of NCMEC CyberTipline referrals lead to federal indictments versus state prosecutions?
Executive summary
There is no reliable percentage in the available reporting that quantifies how many NCMEC CyberTipline referrals result in federal indictments versus state prosecutions; NCMEC itself says it does not routinely have access to case outcomes after referrals are sent to law enforcement [1] [2]. The CyberTipline does publish counts of referrals sent to U.S. law enforcement—more than 1.1 million in 2023—but it does not track or publish the prosecutorial disposition (federal indictment, state prosecution, declined, or other closure reasons) of those referrals [3] [4].
1. What the user is actually asking — and why the data isn’t there
The question seeks a clear split between federal and state prosecutions that originate from CyberTipline referrals, but the infrastructure that generates and distributes tips was not designed to track prosecutorial outcomes back to NCMEC; NCMEC is a nonprofit clearinghouse without investigative or prosecutorial authority and acknowledges it often lacks feedback on whether a given referral resulted in charges long after the report was forwarded [2] [1].
2. What the CyberTipline data actually contains
NCMEC’s public reporting documents the volume and destination of reports—classifying many incoming items as “referrals” when industry suppliers provide investigative details and listing the number of U.S. referrals (over 1.1 million in 2023)—but these reports stop at the handoff to law enforcement and do not include standardized follow-up fields showing whether a federal indictment or state prosecution followed [3] [4] [5].
3. Why a simple federal vs. state percentage would be misleading
Even if post-handoff outcomes were available, interpreting them would be fraught: many CyberTipline reports concern actors or victims outside the United States and are referred overseas (NCMEC reports more than 90% of reports involve uploads by users outside the U.S.), some referrals contain insufficient evidence for prosecution, some are informational only, and platforms vary widely in report quality—factors that skew raw conversion rates from referral to charges [4] [3] [6].
4. What related public data exists — and its limits
Federal initiatives like Project Safe Childhood and historical DOJ indictments show the federal government has prosecuted large numbers of child exploitation cases (for example, U.S. Attorneys reported 2,118 indictments in FY2007 under related programs), but these figures are not traceable to specific CyberTipline referrals in the public record and therefore cannot be used to compute a referral-to-indictment percentage [7]. Any attempt to merge CyberTipline referral counts with independent federal or state prosecution tallies would require case-level linkage that NCMEC and public agencies say they do not routinely make available [2] [1].
5. Competing explanations and institutional incentives
Platform companies are legally required to report certain CSAM to NCMEC, which creates enormous volume and can produce many low‑actionability referrals; advocacy and law‑enforcement sources argue the CyberTipline remains invaluable despite these limits, while critics say the signal-to-noise problem and lack of outcome transparency impede public assessment of effectiveness—an institutional tension reflected in calls to upgrade NCMEC’s technical triage abilities [6] [4].
6. Bottom line for policymakers, reporters and researchers
Based on the provided reporting, it is impossible to state a defensible percentage split of CyberTipline referrals that lead to federal indictments versus state prosecutions because NCMEC does not maintain or publish that outcome-level linkage and law enforcement feedback is not consistently available; researchers seeking such a split would need case-level tracing agreements with prosecuting offices or new mandates requiring outcome reporting [1] [2] [3].