We’re shaking our heads in disbelief.

Police say a 14-year-old boy from Pennsylvania’s Poconos region posed on Facebook as a woman to collect nude photos from dozens of other boys, then threatened to post the photos online if they didn’t send gift cards.

The Pocono Mountain Regional Police arrested the Tobyhanna boy last week on charges of theft by extortion, transmission of sexually explicit images and solicitation.

Investigators say the boy, acting as the fictional Jessica Carabello, promised the boys nude photographs in exchange for their pictures, then threatened to post them online if the boys didn’t send more, and used a similar tactic to solicit gift cards from other boys.

The victims were instructed to buy the gift cards and send the card numbers in messages to the fake Facebook account.

The department says it identified 48 male juvenile victims and at least another 100 juveniles who never responded to the boy’s messages.

The victims could be anyone’s sons or grandsons. This is especially true today, when access to the Internet is nearly universal. It’s foolish and impractical to believe our children aren’t exposed to all the good and evil inhabiting the digital realm now known as “the cloud.”

This is an embarrassing story to talk about, at least partly because we’ve all been exposed to online schemes of all sorts — from the Nairobi prince’s offshore bank accounts to an endless array of miracle health enhancements and get-rich-quick schemes. All are designed to steal the identity, wealth and dignity of unsuspecting strangers.

It might be easier not to discuss this incident with your teenage children. But share it anyway. It’s better for you and your child to share a moment of embarrassment now than to become a victim of online extortion, to go through an ordeal like this, and then have to share the uncomfortable details of the ordeal with police investigators.

It’s unrealistic to assume our children won’t be exposed to the evils that lurk among all the good things available on the Internet. The best we can do is educate them to recognize for themselves the differences between the good and evil they’ll inevitably find there.