Meta, Facebook’s operator, made no response and took no apparent action following the suicide of a teen victim of sextortion on its platform.

In April 2024, we interviewed Phillip Shoemaker, who previously supervised Apple’s App Store.

Shoemaker acknowledged that Apple could prevent harm caused by apps like Album Collections “if it wanted to.”

But Apple has taken no such action. The reason, in Shoemaker’s view, is that profit is everything for Apple, and preventing sexual violence is not a priority.

It’s not only Apple. Major IT platform corporations have neglected to address digital sexual abuse, and victims continue to be harmed around the world.

In the U.S., parents of children who have died by suicide or other means related to online abuse are fighting these IT giants, demanding the corporations do more to prevent further harm.

We interviewed the mother of one such victim. Her 15-year-old son, who took his own life three years ago, was a victim of “sextortion,” a form of blackmail based on sexual images.

Photos displayed in the victim’s room. Riley (center), the youngest sibling and the one who took his own life, closely resembled his mother Mary (center left) when she was a child. Photo taken on March 30, 2024, by crew from the NHK Special “Innovative Investigations.”

Four hours after the smiling photo

On March 30, I visited Canton, a town in upstate New York, USA. The quiet community was surrounded by trees and lakes and dotted with farms and houses. Even in late March, there was still snow on the ground.

Welcoming us into her home was Mary Rodee, who exactly three years earlier had lost her son, Riley Basford, when he was 15 years old. Riley had shot himself with a gun he kept for hunting.

Riley’s photo and ashes were placed on the far side of the living room.

Sitting down, Mary began telling us about her son’s passing.

“It was a beautiful day in March,” she said. “It was pretty warm. March 30th. Yep, three years ago today. We did not go to school that day because Riley got braces on his teeth.”

“We had plans to see him in [only] a couple hours when we had a sporting event. He was totally himself, smiling. I have pictures of him on that day, a live picture of him grinning, showing us his metallic teeth. He went inside, said, ‘See you later, Mom,’” she continued.

At 10:30 a.m., Mary dropped Riley off at home to run another errand. Four hours later, at 2:15 p.m., Riley’s older brother called Mary and told her that Riley had taken his own life.

“I immediately drove over there — still can’t believe it — takes me 20 minutes to get there. And I pull onto the road that Riley lives on. The police are leaving. So then I knew he was dead,” Mary said.

“[They would] still be there if he was alive. And [they would be] helping him, right? The ambulance is leaving. He didn’t go in an ambulance. He went in a hearse,” she continued, recalling standing “on the spot in the yard where I just took the grinning picture of him less than four hours earlier, and now a state trooper is hugging me and telling me how sorry they are.”

“Just a complete shatter of our whole life,” she finished.

Mutual friends? The truth about “Megan Miller”

Why had Riley taken his own life? Mary learned the answer a few days after his suicide.

Riley was being blackmailed using a sexual image of himself by someone he had connected with on Facebook — sextortion.

It was an account presenting itself as a girl named Megan Miller. However, according to the ensuing FBI investigation, the account was fake. A criminal group based in Nigeria had made various other fake accounts to blackmail children.

They had a devious way of approaching victims.

“She sent a friend request to Riley and about a dozen other boys Riley’s age, his friends,” Mary explained. “So she’s opening one kid’s page, picking out kids that are all around the same age, sending this friend request. Riley’s two best friends accept the friend request prior to Riley.”

“Riley then has a friend request and now it says two mutual friends. ‘Well, if [A and B] are friends with this cute girl, she must be a new girl at school. I must know her, or maybe she’s Ryan’s sister’s friend, right? Maybe,’ [he thinks]. So, he accepts the friend request.”

Send $3,500 “or your life is over”

Normally, at school, Riley would not be allowed to touch his phone during the day. But that day, he had stayed home from school.

While exchanging messages with Megan, Megan asked if he had a girlfriend. When Riley replied that he did not, Megan sent him a picture of bare breasts and asked him to send a sexual photo of himself in return. Riley complied.

Soon after, the criminal calling themself Megan began making threats. They demanded that Riley immediately send them $3,500, or else they would spread the photo to everyone he knew.

“We now know he said, ‘Leave me alone. I can’t handle this. I’ll kill myself,’” Mary said. But Megan only responded, “‘You need to send it or your life is over. You might as well. I’ll ruin your life forever anyway.’ [She was] taunting him.”

After Riley’s death, his older brother found that the photo Riley sent Megan had been shared with him too over Facebook Messenger. Several people with the same last name as Riley received the photo from the fake Megan account, which was circulating the photo to people they guessed were Riley’s family and relatives.

(Illustration by qnel)

“Thank you for your comment”

The police were unable to arrest the perpetrators, although they determined they were in Nigeria.

“‘We don’t do business with that country’ is what I get told by the FBI and Homeland Security. Even though they know where this is happening, they cannot go get them [the perpetrators] because ‘we don’t do business with that country,’” Mary said.

The day he found out his son was a victim of sextortion, Riley’s father contacted customer service for Meta, the corporation which operates Facebook. Customer service’s reply simply stated, “Thank you for your comment.”

“It said, ‘Thank you for your comment.’ [But the] comment was, ‘My kid is dead,’ and that’s what you say back? So, just nothing,” Mary remembered.

“Why didn’t he think, ‘My mom would help me’?”

Mary showed us Riley’s room. The walls were decorated with many pictures taken with family and friends, drawings he had made with his siblings, and flags with handwritten messages.

Mary picked up each of them and shared the memories they contained.

Taking up the clothes that lay on the bed, she said, “That’s all I have. Probably still won’t wash his clothes. I had just done his laundry. I know there’s a dirty sock under there that I just… It’s just so weird how he could be right in front of me and then be dead.”

“You just can’t believe that this can happen.”

Mary works as a teacher. She and Riley had regularly discussed not only how to properly use social media, but also self-control and how to deal with stress.

“Riley, he was so funny, so happy, impulsive,” she remembered.

“He was very typical of a teenage boy in that way, and we were working through it. He was going to get through it. He was going to figure it out. He was going to grow up and be ok, you know, and he got that chance taken away from him,” she continued.

Mary, tearfully, repeatedly spoke of her regret at not being able to save her son.

“It’s so hard when you put your heart and soul into your kid their whole life to think, ‘Why didn’t they think, my mom would help me?’ But they scared him so bad he couldn’t even think that,” she said.

“He was 15 years, nine months and 27 days old. So excited to get his driver’s license. Couldn’t wait. He loved his life,” Mary continued. “This is really happening to well-adjusted, normal kids whose parents have had all of the important conversations. I mean, in Riley’s life, we had dealt with so many hard things.”

Mary talking in Riley’s room, in front of sheets she has not been able to wash since he died. Photo taken on March 30, 2024, by reporters from the NHK Special “Innovative Investigations.”

The children committing suicide, one by one

After Riley’s death, Mary gradually got to know other parents who had lost children to suicide over online sexual abuse.

“That was a real turning point to me. [I got to know] a mom whose kid died [in] exactly the same situation one year later, and she had never heard my story and never was warned. Her kid — another one, another one, another one. And they didn’t know about Riley. They didn’t know to tell their kid,” she said.

From there, Mary joined other bereaved family members in advocating for improved online safety.

“I’m angry at Riley being dismissed, you know. He mattered, so much. And all of these kids — they were going to be the good ones, they were going to go in for good in the world,” she said. “That they suffered like that in their short, little life is so terrible. That’s what really has gotten me into [this advocacy work].”

However, Meta has ignored the parents’ message.

To be continued.

(Originally published on August 8, 2024.)

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