3 hours Ago
PHILADELPHIA: Eighteen hours after Jack Sullivan received an Instagram message from a user who called themselves Alice Dave, he was dead. The 20-year-old Kutztown University sophomore was watching a movie, his father next to him on the couch in their Abington home, when the young, strange woman sparked a flirtatious conversation. The two exchanged messages, and later intimate photos on Snapchat – the app infamous for disappearing messages.
But later on that January 2023 night, Alice’s flirty texts were replaced with threats that if Sullivan didn’t send money, she would share the photos with his family, friends and campus community. “all u have to do is cooperate with me and i will not expose u, if you block me i will ruin your life,” Alice wrote, according to law enforcement records. “don’t try to act smart I know where you live.
” By the following afternoon, Sullivan transferred roughly US$2,800 (RM12,401), court records show. But his extortionist refused to delete the photos. Less than 24 hours after the first message, Sullivan walked onto train tracks leading to the Jenkintown SEPTA station.
He paced on the tracks for a few minutes as Alice demanded more payments. “I don’t even think I have enough for it,” he wrote. Three minutes later a passing train struck and killed him.
Sullivan’s death was originally ruled a suicide, but the coroner’s office in Montgomery County changed the cause of death to homicide once details of the events leading up to it became clear. Sullivan was a victim of an online sexual-extortion, or sextortion, scheme. Federal law enforcement have been prosecuting two Nigerian men, Imoleayo Samuel Aina and Samuel Olasunkanmi Abiodun, for their roles in Alice’s account and Sullivan’s death.
Amid the criminal prosecution, Sullivan’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against social media companies, which they said facilitated the crime through their platforms and failed to remove predatory accounts. The December complaint, filed in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, accuses Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – and Snap Inc – which owns Snapchat – of deliberately creating addictive platforms without protecting vulnerable users. “They gave these individuals the tools, the environment, the platform, the algorithm, and the pool of victims to commit their crimes,” said Kevin O’Brien, an attorney with Stampone O’Brien Dilsheimer Holloway who represents the family.
The lawsuit is the latest against tech giants as lawmakers and judges struggle to determine whether social media platforms are neutral publishers of third-party content or products that can be held liable for harm they cause. “Sextortion is a horrific crime,” a spokesperson for Meta said. “We work aggressively to fight it, disrupting networks of scammers and supporting law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting them.
” Snap Inc did not respond to a request for comment. The civil lawsuit also names SEPTA, and businesses that own the land leading to the tracks, as defendants. A spokesperson for SEPTA declined to comment on the litigation but said the agency’s investigation found the train engineer reacted appropriately.
‘Yahoo Boys’ When Jim Sullivan, Jack’s father, received the call that his son was found dead on the train tracks, he was shocked, and set out to piece together his son’s last hours, ultimately learning of the threats from Jack’s phone. He reached out to Alice, who responded with threats. “So we very clearly understood exactly what had happened,” Jim Sullivan said.
Jim Sullivan worked with law enforcement to identify the people who extorted his son, and Aina and Abiodun were extradited in August to face charges of cyberstalking resulting in death, extortion, and wire fraud, and other offences. Abiodun has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and awaits sentencing. Aina’s prosecution is ongoing.
Their attorneys did not respond to requests for comment. The US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania declined to comment. Both men are allegedly associated with a network of mostly Nigerian scammers known as “Yahoo Boys”, originally named for the use of Yahoo email accounts.
Sextortion incidents have increased in recent years, the FBI says. Perpetrators most commonly target boys ages 14 to 17, and the agency received over 13,000 reports of sextortion between October 2021 and March 2023 that led to at least 20 deaths. In August, Levi Maciejewski, the 13-year-old son of the head football coach of Shippensburg University in Cumberland County, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was preyed on in a sextortion scheme, Penn Live reported.
“This can happen to anybody,” Jim Sullivan said. Telephone or cigarette? The Sullivans’ lawsuit goes to the heart of an ongoing debate over harms of social media use – especially for young people – and the legal responsibilities of tech companies. As many as 95% of American teens are on social media platforms, and a third report using them “almost constantly”, according to research cited by a 2023 US Surgeon General advisory.
Teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media platforms have double the risk of depression and anxiety, half of teens report that social media makes them feel worse about the way they look, according to the advisory. Children and teens on social media are also exposed to “challenges” that can promote risky behaviour. For example, a 10-year-old Chester girl, Nylah Anderson, died in 2021 while attempting the “blackout challenge”, a viral TikTok trend that encouraged children to use household items to choke themselves.
The mental health harms, risky challenges, and scams have led to lawsuits by parents nationwide. And courts have been struggling to apply laws that were written before the advent of social media to the reality of complex algorithms and personalised feeds. So far, the US Supreme Court has found that social media platforms aren’t liable when bad actors use their algorithm.
For example, the court held in 2023 that social media companies weren’t aiding and abetting terrorism, even when their algorithms recommended ISIS-related content and their platforms were used for recruitment. “If the Mafia uses the phones, AT&T is not responsible if the Godfather places a hit on someone,” said Amanda Shanor, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, to explain the rationale for these decisions. But what many lawsuits argue – including the Sullivans’ complaint – is that the platform addicted users, increasing their risk for poor mental health.
Or in Jack Sullivan’s case, increasing the chance that he would be an available victim. “This isn’t like a phone, this is like a cigarette,” Shanor said, describing the argument. Last year, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected TikTok’s argument that it can’t be sued over Nylah’s death.
And other lawsuits challenging protections for social media companies are making their way through federal courts. Protecting others Meta has taken steps to reduce the risk of sextortion on its platforms, including an effort to specifically target Yahoo Boys. In July, the company announced that it removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts from Nigeria that attempted to target other users for sextortion.
It also removed Facebook accounts, pages, and groups that were run by the Yahoo Boys. Meta also incorporated a feature that blurs nude images in messages and warns people of the risks of sending them, a spokesperson said. The Sullivans’ lawsuit says this effort is proof Meta could have removed accounts earlier, but didn’t.
“There was nothing preventing these measures, design changes, and/or reasonable warnings from being implemented and integrated into the application products well in advance” of Jack Sullivan’s Jan 4, 2023, death, the complaint says. Snapchat, with its main feature of disappearing messages, couldn’t have been better designed for the Yahoo Boys if the scammers had designed it themselves, said O’Brien, the Sullivans’ lawyer. Jim Sullivan hopes the civil lawsuit can push social media companies to do more.
And he plans to use his experience to speak to young people about the risks that exist on social media. He wants teens and college students to know that it is possible to walk away from the extortion, and connect with an authority figure, despite shame and fear. “Jack was optimistic and a problem solver, empathetic, and a helper and all of these really great, positive resourceful things, and couldn’t see his way out of this trap,” he said.
“You can get yourself out of it.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer/Tribune News Service.
