Content warning: This story contains descriptions of child sexual abuse.<\/i><\/p>\n

The two girls <\/span>at the sleepover huddled together on the bed, passing the cell phone around. They took turns glancing at the screen, fascinated and unsettled by what they saw but unable to look away. Their other friend wanted no part of what was going on.<\/p>\n

Alauna, one of the girls on the bed, was intrigued. Olive-skinned, with blond hair and blue eyes, Alauna was slight for a 12-year-old. With the tap of a finger, she found herself video-chatting with a stranger. About a week later, it happened again at another sleepover, but this time, one of the other girls told her mom that her friends were \u201cacting really weird\u201d at the slumber party. She said Alauna stayed up all night talking to someone who \u201csounded like a man.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the first sleepover, Alauna became increasingly secretive and reclusive. She spent hours on her phone, disappearing into her room, and shielding her screen from her mother, Christal Martin. Finally, after hearing about the slumber party and the person who \u201csounded like a man,\u201d Martin demanded to see her daughter\u2019s phone. There were dozens of images and a video of her child, sometimes naked in provocative positions. Alauna had shared these images with up to 30 men, most of whom she\u2019d met on a chat platform called Omegle.<\/p>\n

The next morning, she put Alauna in the car and drove her to the police station<\/a> in Green River<\/a>, where they lived. Martin, now 37, was raised in this dusty, Wyoming, frontier town (population 12,000) with majestic buttes to the north and a Union Pacific railyard slicing through its middle.<\/p>\n

The police took Martin\u2019s report and Alauna\u2019s phone. They asked Alauna a series of questions and opened an Internet Crimes Against Children investigation. Alauna was furious. She told her mother that she had sent photos to her friends, not to men. \u201cShe freaked out,\u201d Martin says. \u201cShe was angry because I had taken away her phone, and how dare I take her away from her friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was in 2017. Looking back, Martin realizes that her anger at her daughter only exacerbated the problem. Alauna shut down. \u201cShe wouldn\u2019t talk to me about anything,\u201d Martin says. Never one to accept defeat, Alauna snuck into Martin\u2019s bedroom, found an old cell phone, and got back on Omegle. After realizing this, \u201cI just lost it,\u201d Martin says. \u201cYou put your brothers in danger; you put this whole family in danger,\u201d she screamed at Alauna. But Alauna had already warned one man that her mom had alerted the police and vowed to protect him. He was in his 30s or 40s; Alauna was still going through puberty. The man told her to call him \u201cMaster Daddy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Omegle is a website<\/span> that pairs users at random for one-on-one video chats. \u201cThe internet is full of cool people,\u201d the company boasts<\/a>, \u201cOmegle lets you meet them.\u201d It was created by Leif K-Brooks in 2009 when he was 18 years old. (Chatroulette,<\/a> a similar site based in Moscow, launched eight months later.)<\/p>\n

But over the years, according to a lawsuit filed against Omegle, the \u201cmost regular and popular use\u201d for the \u201ccool people\u201d on Omegle \u201cis for live sexual activity, such as online masturbation.\u201d For some men, semi-public masturbation is as far as it goes. Others use Omegle to persuade children to perform sex acts, expose them to porn, or even meet in real life, according to court documents. The men who use Omegle to sexually exploit children have been the subject of numerous federal investigations, and the company has been the target of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, and a UN Special Rapporteur investigation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even so, many people over 30 have never heard of it; a lot of teens have, thanks in part to the pandemic. In January 2020, the site had 26 million monthly visits. Six months later, the New York Times<\/em><\/a> ran a piece on Omegle\u2019s popularity among teenagers stuck at home, and social media stars who started using the platform to keep a connection with their fans. The article also revealed the site\u2019s dark side. \u201cThere\u2019s the shock factor of it all,\u201d an 18-year-old YouTuber named Nailea Devora told the Times<\/em>. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of sexual porn stuff. We just film our reactions, like, \u2018OMG I didn\u2019t want to see that!\u2019\u201d By January 2021, according to the internet data firm Semrush, the site had 54 million monthly visits, due largely to Omegle users sharing videos of their more innocuous encounters to other apps. On TikTok alone, for example, videos tagged \u201cOmegle\u201d have racked up nearly 11 billion views.<\/p>\n