A Canadian national has been sentenced to 33 years in federal prison following prosecution in Washington, D.C., for an eight-year sextortion scheme that victimised 145 children across the United States, some as young as six years old. Ramanan Pathmanathan used fraudulent Instagram and Facebook Messenger accounts to impersonate a teenage boy, exploiting direct-message functionality on Meta platforms to initiate contact, coerce victims, and solicit child sexual abuse material over the course of nearly a decade. The case represents one of the most extensive international sextortion prosecutions to date and highlights the sustained vulnerability of children communicating via direct messaging on mainstream social media services.
Guardii, a world-leading AI online-safety platform and Meta Business Partner backed by Startmate, operates anti-sextortion detection modules designed to intercept precisely this category of predatory contact before harm occurs. By monitoring children's direct messages in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox, and other platforms, Guardii's privacy-preserving pattern-recognition technology identifies coercive solicitation, age-inappropriate contact, and sextortion behaviours at the point of approach—blocking or flagging hostile contact, preserving digital evidence for parents and law enforcement, and preventing victimisation that would otherwise unfold undetected over months or years. Had such targeted AI-driven interception been deployed, the predatory requests and material solicitation documented in this case could have been stopped at first contact, preventing the exploitation of 145 children across eight years and providing actionable intelligence to investigators from the outset rather than relying on retrospective prosecution alone.
