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The Instagram message popped up from a girl named Chelsea: “Howdy.”

David didn’t know anyone named Chelsea, but he clicked through her profile: She had brown hair and a nice smile; under her name was a quote from the Bible. He thought it was sort of weird that she was messaging him, a stranger, in the middle of a workday, but her pouty selfies made that easy to ignore.

He was hesitant when she asked him to chat, but soon her flirty messages escalated to a volley of explicit pictures, and David, a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, got carried away. When she asked him for a nude, he hardly thought twice, he said. He slipped into the bathroom at the New Jersey hospital where he works, took a picture and hit send.

Within seconds, the threats began.

David’s phone lit up with messages: pictures he had sent with his genitals exposed alongside screenshots of his Instagram followers with whom he shares a last name — his family. “She said: I’m demanding $500, if not I’m going to send it to all of these people,” said David, who asked that only his middle name be used to protect his privacy. “Then she started a countdown.”

But there was no Chelsea. The real person behind the account, David said, was a man who, over the course of three fraught days, inadvertently revealed he was in Nigeria as he demanded hundreds of dollars to keep David’s pictures private. As he paid up, David joined the thousands of people cowed under a new scam that has exploded over the past three years to become the fastest-growing cybercrime, according to both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

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Kids Online Safety Act. 

Take action. Be part of the solution. If you know of or hear of anything, call 911 immediately and 1-800-THE-LOST.

“….. A child goes missing every 40 seconds in the U.S., over 2,300 per day.  In excess of 800,000 children are reported missing each year; another 500,000 go missing without ever being reported.” – Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

A missing person is defined by the Department of Public Safety (DPS) as: A person, who has been reported missing, by a credible person, whose whereabouts are unknown.

What about all the children that are never reported? Where are they? It’s time we start asking.

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The New York Times has released a trove of raw government data on the unaccompanied alien children who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. Among over 10,000 pages of information is data on the number of children who crossed the border into America without an adult and then were handed over to someone other than a family member.

From January 2015 through May 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released tens of thousands of minors who crossed the border illegally to sponsors who weren’t an immediate or distant relative, raising concerns about human trafficking and forced labor.

“More children are crossing the border on their own than ever before, and thousands are ending up doing dangerous, illegal jobs,” New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier wrote on X in a thread sharing the numbers with the public.

The Times sued the government to gain access to the records, which reveal more than 550,000 minors crossed the border illegally between 2015, halfway through Barack Obama’s second term as president, through May 2023, about two years and four months into Joe Biden’s presidency. From 2017 through 2020, Donald Trump was president.

Read more here. 

As technology has opened up opportunities to communicate, it has also created new avenues for bullying, allowing bullies to harm victims outside of school hours. Algorithms promote content that keeps young users coming back for more, even when platforms know they are exposing kids and teens to potentially fatal challenges. The relationship between social media’s design features and kids’ and teens’ access to narcotic drugs and other illegal substances has been well documented. Algorithms promote content that keeps young users coming back for more, even when platforms know that they are increasing anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

There is a complete lack of common sense safety features on most social media platforms that creates an unacceptable risk of sexual exploitation for minors.

Learn more. Take Action. Intervene. Educate. Protect. #communitycreateschange #BeAWarrior

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