A man with more than 260,000 followers on TikTok carried out a shooting at his New York high school two decades earlier. Jon Romano served 17 years of a 25-year prison sentence for opening fire at Columbia High School in 2004 with a pump-action shotgun. In a TikTok video from July, Romano said he planned …
Facebook’s manager of global community development is out of a job after he was reportedly caught trying to meet a 13-year-old boy he groomed online. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, confirmed to TechCrunch that Jeren Miles no longer works for the company. The announcement comes after a vigilante group called PCI Predator Catchers Indianapolis …
A Connecticut mother has filed a lawsuit against Snapchat and Facebook, claiming the social media platforms are responsible for her 11-year-old daughter’s suicide last year. Social Media Victims Law Center filed a lawsuit in California on behalf of Tammy Rodriguez, whose daughter killed herself in July 2021. Rodriguez said her daughter had a severe addiction …
The family of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl who died last week said she tried a dangerous game that trended on social media. WPVI reported that Nyla Anderson’s December 12 death was linked to the “Blackout Challenge,” a trend popularized on TikTok which encourages participants to hold their breath until losing consciousness. The girl was reportedly …
Apple reportedly paid millions of dollars to a 21-year-old Oregon woman after its contracted repair techs posted nude photos on her phone on her Facebook page. According to The Telegraph, in 2016 the woman brought her iPhone to a California facility run by Pegatron, an Apple contractor after it had stopped working. The woman alleged …
A 12-year-old boy in Colorado died on Saturday, two weeks after a dangerous online game reportedly left him brain dead. A GoFundMe established by Joshua Haileyesus’ family said he was on life support for 19 days after his twin brother found him unresponsive in a bathroom on March 22. Haileyesus apparently used a shoelace to …
Omegle — a live video chat website that does not require registration or age verification — has drawn the ire of international child protection groups who say the platform attracts child predators. “Predators have been known to use Omegle, so please be careful,” Omegle’s homepage warns. Despite this, the website’s slogan is “Talk to strangers!” …
Early reports indicate the teen had thought he was buying Xanax or painkillers. His parents said there is “no way” he knew he had received a much more potent drug
Last week, an unknown suspect allegedly hacked into a Florida water treatment plant’s computer system and attempted to poison the water supply. On February 5, the City of Oldsmar alerted Pinellas police to an unauthorized person remotely accessing the water treatment plant’s computer system. The hacker is believed to have initially breached the system at …
On Thursday, a former home security technician in Texas admitted to routinely hacking into customers’ live video feeds for more than four years. Ex-ADT employee Telesforo Aviles, 35, pleaded guilty to computer fraud. Citing documents, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Texas said he confessed to linking his email address to customers’ …
A former principal in Kentucky who is serving a nine-year federal prison sentence was ordered last week to pay $3.6 million for confiscating students’ phones and uploading their nude photos to the internet. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, six accusers named ex-LaRue County High School principal Stephen Goodlett, 40, and the LaRue County School District …
The father of Noah Pozner — the youngest of 26 people killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 — reportedly wore a disguise during a sitdown interview with CBS “60 Minutes” as he continues to be the target of online and in-person harassment. According to CBS, theatrical makeup artists created a disguise for Leonard Pozner …
