Speaking for his son

Walker Montgomery, 16, of Starkville, Miss., was scrolling Instagram at midnight in his bedroom last December when a message popped up: “Hey, what’s up?” The sender’s profile displayed an attractive teen girl who claimed to live locally and share mutual friends.

The messaging lasted hours and turned flirtatious, then sexual. By 3 a.m., Walker agreed to a video chat on the photo-sharing platform and engaged in a sexual act. Minutes later, the person on the other end said the act had been recorded. The perpetrator threatened to share the video with Walker’s friends and family and demanded $1,000, which the teen didn’t have.

That same morning, Walker took his own life.

“I can’t even imagine the tremendous fear and panic he was under,” his father, Brian Montgomery, told me in a phone conversation. “Walker stepped right into a trap.”

Brian wants to help other teen boys avoid similar traps. On Feb. 7, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and international law enforcement agencies warned of a “global financial sextortion crisis” affecting primarily boys. Last year, the FBI saw more than 7,000 reports of online sextortion of minors, an “exponential increase from ­previous years,” it said. More than a dozen of those incidents ended with the victim committing suicide.

According to information federal investigators gleaned from Walker’s phone, the scheme that targeted the teen involved escalating threats. After Walker insisted he did not have $1,000, the perpetrator demanded he steal from his parents and sent him screenshots appearing to show the explicit video recording being shared with Walker’s Instagram contacts. Despite the boy’s ­pleadings, the perpetrator threatened to send the video to Walker’s mother. When the teen warned he would kill himself, the extortioner allegedly replied, “You’re already dead anyway.”

In recent months, Brian has shared Walker’s story at dozens of Mississippi schools and with parents, school administrators, and some state lawmakers. He said he has already heard from about 50 parents whose children have experienced similar blackmail schemes.

Brian has little hope that Walker’s perpetrators—or Meta, the social media company that owns Instagram—will be held accountable. Federal investigators pinpointed the origin of the sextortion scheme in Nigeria, he said, and issued a warrant for Instagram to release the internet protocol address. “You’ve got a tech business that is giving a tool to ­criminals without any protections; … they have no incentive to block those ­interactions until we have enough ­public opinion telling our politicians, ‘Enough.’”

Some lawmakers are seeking to hold tech companies more accountable. On Mar. 23, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, signed first-in-the-nation legislation requiring social media users younger than 18 to have parental ­consent and barring them from using social media platforms between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. Utah’s laws take effect in March 2024. Last year, California passed a bill that establishes design and data privacy standards for tech companies providing online services likely to be accessed by children.

Social media companies have largely avoided responsibility for online harms due to Section 230, a 1996 federal telecommunications law protecting them from being sued over harmful content posted on their platforms by third-party users. Last year, a bill that would have reformed Section 230 with the intent of holding tech companies more accountable for protecting kids failed in the U.S. Senate. Civil liberties and tech industry groups have pushed back against state and federal legislative efforts, citing privacy and free speech concerns.

Amid growing public scrutiny, some social media companies—such as Instagram and TikTok—have responded by offering more parental controls, including time restrictions and messaging limits. But many say that is not enough.

“It’s putting a lot of responsibility on kids and parents to know how these different apps work in the day and age when parents didn’t grow up with tech like this,” said Victoria Rousay of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. She notes that some apps, such as the video chat app Discord, still feature no parental controls.

Brian hopes that Walker’s story serves as a wake-up call. For now, he is focusing on talking with parents about what he wishes he had done differently: taking Walker’s phone at night, prohibiting him from having it in his bedroom, checking his online activity, and talking more about the dangers.

Brian says speaking publicly about Walker’s life and sudden death does not alleviate his grief. But as a professing Christian, he says, “the background … is our faith in Christ. He has a plan, and it may be that we’re His vessels for this particular change.”