“Hey,” read the Instagram message on Jordan DeMay’s iPhone. Six hours later he was dead. Jordan, a 17-year-old high school football and basketball star in Marquette, Michigan, was one of a number of suicides linked to online “sextortion” scams. Criminals posing as young women were luring teenage boys to send them compromising photographs and blackmailing them. Bloomberg investigations reporter Olivia Carville brought national attention to the problem by vividly reconstructing what happened to Jordan, using interviews with family and friends, court documents and his text messages with “Dani,” actually Nigerian brothers not much older than him. The pair were eventually arrested, extradited to the US and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The Roblox story, written with Cecilia D’Anastasio, shows how pedophiles were using the popular gaming app to groom underage victims. It documents more than two dozen cases involving sexual predators accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met on the popular gaming platform Roblox. Carville and D’Anastasio focus on one of those cases, involving a game developer named Arnold Castillo, known as DoctorRofatnik. He was arrested for luring a 15-year-old Indiana girl to his home in New Jersey where he raped her multiple times.
In a third story, Carville wrote about how drug dealers are using the popular disappearing-message app Snapchat to meet and sell counterfeit pills to unsuspecting teenagers. The article focused on the case of 13-year-old Michael Brewer, who bought a fentanyl-laced pill from a dealer he met on Snapchat that had near-fatal results. Michael is one of 64 kids, most of whom died, whose families are suing parent company Snap, alleging the app’s disappearing messages and a Quick Add feature that enables dealers to connect with strangers make it attractive to buyers and sellers alike. Lawyers are using an unusual legal strategy to attack Section 230 of 1996 Communications and Decency Act, the liability shield that has protected social media companies for decades, claiming their design, not their content, is the problem.
These stories, published in Bloomberg Businessweek, have had an impact. After the sextortion article was published, Meta removed more than 70,000 suspicious accounts from its Instagram and Facebook services; it also introduced a nudity-blurring feature, blocked potentially scammy accounts from seeing the networks of other users and sent educational videos to millions of teens warning them about the crime. After the Roblox story was published, a court in Turkey banned the gaming platform, citing child safety, and the company updated its default settings for kids and barred users under 13 from accessing certain chat features without parental permission. Carville’s reporting in these stories, and in accompanying videos and podcasts, has helped bring national attention to the issue.
