A lawsuit filed Friday in Oregon claimed that Omegle that encourages children to “talk to strangers” is dangerous for kids and it allowed a minor to send explicit images to a pedophile.
The federal suit claimed that it has become a destination for pedophiles who use the chat site to watch others pleasure themselves, reported New York Post. According to the $22 million suit, kids aged 13 and older can use the platform, which has 66 million monthly users, with parental supervision and permission, but there is no way to ensure that users are being supervised.
About seven years ago, a girl, 11, identified as “A.M.” logged on to the site in hopes of meeting people of her age, but she ended up connecting to Ryan Scott Fordyce, a now-convicted Canadian pedophile, who is facing 10 years in jail.
He started grooming her and forced her to give him her contact details so they could connect off the platform as well. According to the suit, he asked her to send him her nude photos and told her he could make her “feel better” and she needed to trust him because it was “integral to her ‘healing,'” even if his requests didn't make her feel comfortable.
Initially, the pedophile wanted to see photos of her “smile," but soon he started demanding images of her body and then started asking for specific hairstyles, positions and poses. His twisted “assignments" came with deadlines, and he threatened to harm her family or kidnap her. The child was required to be “at his beck and call” “at all hours of the day and night.”
While the sick interactions did not happen on the chat site, the platform remained an important part of their relationship as he forced her to use it to recruit other kids for him. She was told that she could stop sending him photos whenever she wanted, but if she did so, he said that he would leak them to her family and friends, and she could land in trouble. Fordyce threatened her for three years then in January 2018, Canadian cops contacted her parents to tell them the pedophile had been arrested for child pornography and photos of their daughter had been found.
A.M. and her lawyers said that the platform helped to meet him, so she holds it responsible for her abuse and if they had employed safety measures or mechanisms to prevent children from matching with adults, she would’ve never suffered abuse.
A.M., who is now 19, said that this lawsuit is bigger than her, and the damage has already been done to her, but she and her team are "determined to protect the children after me that are just as vulnerable as I was. Nobody deserves this." Omegle is yet to comment on it.
Last month, Fordyce pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography for the purpose of distribution, and communicating with a person aged under 18 by means of telecommunication, reported Oregon Live.
