New Mexico AG sues Snapchat, says it knew about ‘rampant’ sextortion

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said Tuesday, Oct. 1, that internal documents from Snapchat show the company knew sextortion was rampant on the social media platform but did nothing to stop it. The documents, which are part of an ongoing lawsuit , were unredacted Tuesday.

In the lawsuit, Torrez claimed Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, knew about a “sextortion handbook” circulating the dark web, which gave instructions on how use the Snap Maps feature to target a school.

Sextortion is when a person leads a victim to send naked or compromising photos of themselves – then threatens the victim to make the images public unless the victim pays money or performs sexual favors.

The lawsuit also says in 2022 alone, Snap employees were aware of 10,000 reports of sextortion involving the platform each month, and in an internal company email it acknowledged the reports likely only accounted for a “fraction of this abuse.”

The lawsuit also claims multiple reports about sextortion and grooming made against the same users were mostly ignored . It also alleges internal data collected by Snap shows about a third of its young users had been exposed to unwanted contact.

The New Mexico AG’s lawsuit also claims Snap openly promotes child trafficking and the sale of illicit drugs and guns.

Snapchat responded to the filing in a statement on its website Tuesday, saying, “We designed Snapchat as a place to communicate with a close circle of friends, with built-in safety guardrails, and have made deliberate design choices to make it difficult for strangers to discover minors on our service.”

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