Sexting & Sextortion Scams
I don't know why I'm still surprised to see some people just have no souls
These platforms absolutely should bear some responsibility in these cases
If they start getting hit with multi million dollar judgments maybe they'll actually do something to help stop these from happening
===============================================================
Samuel Hervey, a 25-year-old in the throes of a severe mental health crisis, positioned his phone so its camera would capture the gruesome spectacle that was about to unfold.
The Minnesota native stepped into the frame of the video live stream, his long hair spilling from the hood of a white sweatshirt. He sat down cross-legged and emptied a plastic bottle filled with gasoline onto his head and his clothing. Then he lit a flame.
As fire engulfed him, more than two dozen people watched in a private video chatroom on the popular messaging app Discord. They laughed, cheered and congratulated themselves, according to a recording reviewed by The Washington Post.
Among those watching the November 2021 live stream was a 15-year-old girl in an Eastern European city who had spent much of the previous week in close contact with Hervey, urging him in private messages and voice calls to take his life on camera, The Post found. It was an effort, she later said in an interview, to impress others in a global online community that rewards cruelty.
“I was getting my big break,” she recalled thinking during Hervey’s suicide. “It was a competition of who could do the worst thing. So I obviously felt very cool.”
The circumstances leading to Hervey’s self-immolation remained mostly a mystery to his family and friends and to law enforcement. The Post traced the suicide to the online community known as “
764” and found that it was enabled by a messaging app the group has used to find victims halfway across the globe and lure them into closed, largely unmoderated spaces.
Hervey’s path into a virtual den of predation — and the role of a teenager who believed coaxing a stranger to kill himself on camera would boost her social status — offers a disturbing case study of what federal prosecutors warn is an emerging threat posed by sadistic groups that target vulnerable people online. And it illustrates the deadly consequences when social media platforms fail to contain that threat.
The Post located the girl, who operated under the screen name “Fmlk,” through an extensive analysis of her digital footprint. Now 18, she spoke on the condition that she be identified only by her Discord screen name, age and region.
The Post is not naming her because she was a minor at the time. She said she agreed to talk because she regrets her actions, which she said also included encouraging a teenage girl to kill herself on a live stream in March 2022. Fmlk said she has since left the online group.
“I feel very bad for what I did, even now,” she said during one of several in-person interviews in her home city. “It’s something that happened when I was in a bad space. … I feel like this thing is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”
The FBI has said 764 — named for the first three numbers of the Zip code of the town in Texas where its
founder lived — and its offshoots have targeted thousands of children in recent years, often persuading them to share nude photos and then extorting them into harming animals or themselves.
In a
warning late last year, the agency said the groups try to get their victims, many of whom have mental health issues, to kill themselves on camera “for their own entertainment or their own sense of fame.” The FBI has said the group meets the definition of a domestic terror organization.
Although Discord prohibits promoting self-harm on its platform, Hervey and others communicated about his suicide plans for more than a week in a chatroom that was created specifically to broadcast his death, The Post found.................