Photo: OLI SCARFF / AFP / Getty Images
A chat site that encourages children to “talk to strangers” became a dangerous fate that influenced a girl of 11 years was forced to become the sex slave digital predator , claims a multi-million dollar claim.
Omegle , which randomly matches users for video and text chats, bills itself as an “excellent way to meet new friends, ”but it has become a haven for pedophiles and stalkers who use the site to see how people are having fun, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday in Oregon.
The site, which features 66 million monthly users worldwide, says that children older than 13 anus s can use the platform with parental permission and supervision, but it has no system in place to ensure they are being supervised, according to the lawsuit for $ 22 millions of dollars.
The site also does not require users to verify their age or name before using the social network and has no mechanism to prevent children from being randomly matched with adults and vice versa, the lawsuit says. .
In a 11 year old girl, who identified herself as “AM” logged into Omegle after wearing it with her friends at sleepovers in hopes of meeting other high school students like her.
Instead, she was connected with Ryan Scott Fordyce, a now convicted Canadian pedophile, who had around 22 years at that time and now facing 10 years behind bars.
Fordyce immediately began grooming the girl and forced her to give her her information to that they could keep in touch outside the platform that allows users to be anonymous.
There, he asked her to send him pictures of her naked and told her that he could make her “feel better” and that she needed to trust him because he was “integral to her ‘healing’”, even if his requests made her feel uncomfortable, according to the lawsuit.
At first, Fordyce wanted to see images of the girl’s “smile”, but soon he began to ask for snapshots of her body and then began to demand “poses, accessories, positions and hairstyles”
The pedophile set deadlines for his twisted “assignments”, threatened to kidnap AM or harm his family and demand that he is “at his entire available ”“ at all hours of the day and night ”.
Although the Fordyce and AM interactions did not happen within the Omegle site, the platform continued to be a central part of their relationship because he forced her to use the website to recruit other children for him, court documents claim.
Fordyce threatened to leak the photos to his family and friends and told him he would meddle in trouble with his parents, the school and the police.
For three years, Fordyce maintained this threat on AM
It wasn’t until January 2018, when members of a Canadian police force contacted his parents to tell them that the pervert had been arrested for child pornography and that he was they had found images of their daughter in her hiding place.
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