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The messages, which arrived while a 13-year-old in New Jersey was playing a tactical shooter video game called “Valorant,” came from a player in Virginia who said he worked for a U.S. intelligence agency and wanted the teen to disrobe on a video platform called Discord.
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“I will give rl [real life] one more chance if we play strip,” the man said in one February message, threatening suicide unless the teen stripped on camera while gaming, according to court documents. The man also sent $500 through a cash transfer app to entice the minor, the FBI said.
After the New Jersey family contacted authorities, FBI agents discovered that Brett Janes, 26, who worked as a U.S. intelligence contractor, was behind Discord messages sent to teens from the username “revision#3409.” Janes pleaded guilty Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., to child sexual exploitation and receipt of child pornography. He faces a minimum of 15 years in federal prison.
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The case shows how some tech-savvy users target minors, build a rapport and manipulate them into sending explicit images and videos on social media platforms. Video game aficionados gravitate to Discord, a live-streaming app with voice and video chat functions, to communicate with one another in real time while playing multiplayer games. Janes would show an official ID badge while chatting with teens interested in tactical shooting games, according to the FBI, in what experts on online sex crimes called a show of authority meant to impress or intimidate them.
“We’ve known for some time that spaces that focus on video games in particular are one of the hunting grounds of predators, because they know that’s where young people will go,” said Mary Anne Franks, a George Washington University law professor and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. As many people remained homebound during the coronavirus pandemic, Franks said, her group saw an increase in online sexual extortion scams, “and the targets of those were increasingly young men.”
Justice Department officials for years have warned that the online sexual extortion of teens is a growing problem that has led some victims to suicide. More than 32 million reports of suspected online child exploitation were filed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children last year, a number that “has been growing exponentially,” said Patricia Davis, a spokeswoman for the organization.
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Reports of minors being enticed online to perform sexual acts began to skyrocket during the pandemic, quadrupling from 2019 to 2022, when they reached 80,524, according to the center. U.S. authorities said the statistics are probably an undercount, because many cases of online grooming, or “sextortion,” go unreported.
Prosecutors usually obtain long prison terms for such offenses, aided by federal laws that require first-time offenders be sentenced to mandatory minimums of five years for transporting and 15 years for producing child pornography.
A Manassas, Va., man admitted he recorded hundreds of explicit videos of girls he met on a website called Omegle, which paired random users together for video chats. He was sentenced in August to 16 years in federal prison. The website shut down Thursday after 14 years online.
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A judge in January sentenced a Maryland man to 35 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to producing and distributing explicit videos of a 13-year-old boy who would trade messages with him on social media. A Herndon, Va., man who admitted he enticed a 15-year-old girl to produce explicit materials, which he then shared with users on a messaging app, received a 25-year prison term this year.
Federal and state authorities disrupted an online child exploitation ring in recent months, obtaining prison sentences in several states. Members would entice minors, including a 12-year-old victim, to send explicit materials that they would post to a website called rapey.su. In Virginia, two men were sentenced this year to 20 years in prison, two others received terms of more than six years and a woman received 15 years in 2022 for activities on the website. More users were prosecuted in other jurisdictions.
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“This case shows that internet anonymity will not protect offenders from facing full accountability for their illegal online conduct,” U.S. Attorney Jessica D. Aber, whose office prosecuted the Virginia cases, said in a statement in May.
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Janes, of Arlington, Va., admitted that he obtained explicit images and videos depicting minors from five teens he chatted with on Discord and Snapchat, including the 13-year-old in New Jersey, according to documents filed with his guilty plea Tuesday. Janes also admitted that he paid a user on the Telegram messaging app and gained access to dozens of videos and images depicting child sexual abuse.
The FBI said in an arrest-warrant application in May that Janes was a contractor for a U.S. intelligence agency, which is not identified in court documents, who had taken a different contract position “within a headquarters unit in the FBI” as of late May. His sentencing is scheduled for February.
“Janes manipulated these minors by befriending, flattering, and outright begging them for content,” according to a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which prosecuted Janes. The statement added that the materials he purchased on Telegram included “graphic videos of prepubescent children being raped.”
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A public defender for Janes did not respond to requests for comment.
One strategy for parents or guardians who may not know their way around Discord or similar apps, Franks said, is to reinforce to children that they can always ask for support.
“Technology is always going to be much more familiar to younger generations than older ones. … Partly for that reason, it’s a little bit of a fool’s errand to think, ‘What do I, as a parent, need to know about the new tech dangers?’” she said. “You can talk to your kid about how, as a general rule, if you set up certain boundaries for yourself emotionally or physically, and someone keeps trying to push past them, that’s a red flag.”
Tech companies such as Discord have a “serious responsibility,” she added, because their platforms are designed to run 24/7 “with basically no oversight.”
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The FBI warrant application lists several written Discord messages in which Janes allegedly sought to play “strip” versions of popular video games. The filing recounts how the New Jersey teen acceded on one occasion, then resisted, telling Janes to “wait for my dad to sleep dude” and then asking to play “not strip just regualr.”
The next day, Janes wrote to the 13-year-old on Discord that he would give “real life” another chance “if we play strip,” the warrant says. He complained that the teen had blocked him on other messaging platforms, before adding “im just going to kill myself cause no one likes me.”
Referring to cash transfers he had sent the teen, Janes wrote, “please just answer so i am not being crazy and stupid for sending 500 bucks to a 14 yr old,” the warrant says.
In a statement of facts filed in court, the prosecutors and the defense agreed that Janes “is aware that additional suspected child pornography was found within his social media accounts and investigation into these suspected victims is ongoing.”
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