The parents of a 16-year-old boy who took his own life after being targeted by a sextortion gang on Instagram are suing Meta for wrongful death, in what is believed to be the first UK case of its kind. Murray Dowey died at his family home in Dunblane in December 2023, after being tricked into sending intimate pictures to an Instagram contact he thought was a girl his age, but who turned out to be overseas criminals.
Ros and Mark Dowey, along with the family of a 13-year-old from Pennsylvania who also died from sextortion, filed the lawsuit in Delaware, where Meta Platforms is incorporated. They accuse Meta of prioritising engagement over user safety, alleging that design flaws in Instagram allowed predators to target their sons. The complaint states that Meta collected personal data without informed consent and used it to recommend teen users to known predators.
Meta is also accused of making false and misleading statements about Instagram's safety for teens, while internal testing showed the platform was matchmaking children with adult predators. The lawsuit claims that the deaths were a foreseeable result of Meta's refusal to implement affordable safety features. The Doweys' lawyer, Matthew Bergman, said Meta was involved in all US-based sextortion cases he had filed, calling it a product defect issue.
Mark Dowey said nothing had changed since his son's death and that predators could still access children. He described the lawsuit as a way to get justice for Murray, adding that Meta had known its products were killing children through unsafe design but had chosen profit over young people. Ros Dowey said she felt a duty to warn other parents that children are not safe on Instagram.
Instagram has previously condemned sextortion as a horrific crime and introduced new safety features, including preventing screenshots of private images. However, the Doweys argue that more needs to be done to protect young users from financially motivated sexual extortion, which has risen sharply in the UK, US and Australia, with teenage boys often targeted by cybercriminal gangs based in south-east Asia and west Africa.
