Matt Bergman Presents on Snapchat Sextortion Cases at MTMP 2026

At the Mass Torts Made Perfect conference on 16 October 2026, Matthew P. Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center presented cases in which adults allegedly used Snapchat to reach children, describing product features that enabled adults to find, approach, deceive and exploit minors. The session examined whether Snapchat's design decisions made such encounters foreseeable, referencing a case of an 11 year old girl contacted by adults on Instagram and Snapchat with conversations moving between platforms. Bergman cited Utah state enforcement filings from July 2025 alleging that an account attracting 75 exploitation reports continued to operate, and noted that documents from state enforcement actions contain internal material about how platforms handled such reports, with Mike Papantonio emphasizing that these filings drive damages in civil litigation.

Point-of-contact intervention prevents the encounter these cases describe. Guardii detects when an unknown adult opens a direct-message conversation with a child, when persuasion escalates to coercion, and when a request for an image follows a compliment or a threat, blocking the message before it reaches the child and surfacing the pattern to a parent or school professional in real time. Its anti-sextortion module is calibrated to the sequence these attorneys documented: the initial approach, the trust-building exchange, the pivot to sexual content, the demand and the threat. By acting at the pattern level rather than reading every message, the technology built by this Meta Business Partner allows a safeguarding professional to see that a child is in danger without handing anyone a feed of what was said, and enables rapid escalation to law enforcement when the contact meets the threshold for criminal referral.