New Mexico's Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced a lawsuit against Snap, the creator of Snapchat, citing concerns that the app's design features create a permissive atmosphere for sexual predators targeting children. The investigation revealed that Snapchat's environment has become a breeding ground for sextortion, a form of coercion where individuals impersonate peers to pressure minors into sharing explicit content and then threaten to release it unless a ransom is paid.

This alarming trend has contributed to numerous tragic outcomes, including suicides among teenagers who have fallen victim to these crimes. The Attorney General criticized Snapchat for misleading users into believing that their shared photos and videos would disappear, while in reality, these images can be permanently captured by predators, resulting in an illicit collection of child sexual images that are traded and stored without consent.

The New Mexico Department of Justice discovered a significant number of dark web sites used to distribute inappropriate images obtained through Snapchat, with records indicating over 10,000 instances of child sexual abuse material in the past year. Victims identified included minors under the age of 13. To further illustrate the issue, investigators created a fake Snapchat account posing as a 14-year-old girl and engaged with accounts explicitly named to promote predatory behavior.

Additionally, it was reported that an individual named Alegandro Marquez was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the rape of an 11-year-old girl he encountered on Snapchat. In response to the lawsuit, Snap mentioned that they are assessing the allegations and preparing for court, emphasizing their ongoing efforts to enhance safety for users, educate the community, and provide tools to protect teens and their parents online. It was noted that Snapchat boasts a user base of over 20 million teens in the U.S., with half of this demographic engaged with the app daily. New Mexico previously initiated a similar legal action against Meta Platforms and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg in December.