Warning: This story contains disturbing themes for adults
As a young girl, Alice (not her real name) signed up to the popular live video chat website, Omegle, and was randomly matched with a pedophile, who forced her to become a digital sex slave.
Nearly 10 years later, a young American woman is suing Omegle in a landmark case that could pave the way for a wave of lawsuits against other social platforms.
The smallest details can remind Alice of the abuse she suffered as a child.
Her abuser was very specific about how she should look in the videos where he forced her to send them to him, telling her to pull her hair into a ponytail on the left side of her head.
"I was only 11, but he wanted me to look as young as possible," she says.
Even now, if Alice's hair is pulled to the left, she shivers violently.
Today, Alice is a confident 21-year-old girl in a relationship, but she says the scars of the abuse she suffered will remain with her for the rest of her life.
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When Alice first experienced Omegle, it had already become notorious as a wild corner of the internet.
"My friends and I were on Omegle for a night party," she says.
"Everyone at school knew about it. But apparently, no one knew what the dangers were," he adds.
Today, the website has about 73 million visitors a month, according to analysts at the website monitoring company Semrush, mostly from India, the US, the UK, Mexico and Australia.
For some teenagers, it's a rite of passage where they pair up with a stranger in a live video chat where anything can happen.
After sleeping, Alice signed herself up on Omegle, and that's when they connected her with Canadian pedophile Ryan Fordyce.
At the time, she was struggling with early teenage anxieties and Fordyce made her feel better.
During that first video chat, he convinced her to share details of personal messages.
"He could manipulate me right away," she says.
"Very quickly I was forced to do things that a child shouldn't do," she adds.
After forcing her to send intimate images, Fordyce convinced her that she was complicit in the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material.
In fear of arrest, she hid everything from her family and friends.
"I spent a large part of my childhood by always being at his disposal. Every day to be at the mercy of someone else who had the worst intentions for the children."
This continued for three years, until finally Fordyce seemed to lose interest and communication ceased.
Alice planned to take the secret to the grave, but then the Canadian police noticed that someone was sharing material about child sexual abuse on the Internet.
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Officer Pam Klassen, a forensic scientist with the police department in Brandon - a small town about 200 kilometers west of Winnipeg - found the IP address of Ryan Fordyce's family home and obtained a search warrant.
Fordyce was not there when she visited him on January 12, 2018, but she managed to log into his computer and came across a horrifying collection of images and videos of sexual abuse, sent by children at his behest.
When Fordyce came home for lunch, she arrested him.
"He was surprised," she says, adding that "his wife thought there must have been a mistake."
Police found seven folders on the computer, each with a different name of the girl.
One contained 220 images and videos of Alice, aged between 11 and 14, in some of which she was forced to masturbate or urinate.
Pam Klaassen traced Alice through her school uniform, which was visible in some of the material, and Fordyce was sentenced to eight years in prison in December 2021.
Fordyce, a father of two in his late thirties, also used Omegle to prepare two other victims.
AM vs. Omegle
With Fordyce behind bars, Alice now heads to Omegle in a case closely watched around the world.
Known as a product liability lawsuit, it may be the first time a technology platform has been sued for the way it was built.
Dozens of other product liability cases have been brought against platforms like Instagram and Snapchat in the past year, but Alice's case — AM v. Omegle — is likely to lead the way.
"In the United States, we have Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which makes it incredibly difficult to ever sue an online platform," explains Alice's attorney Keri Goldberg.
"But a few years ago, we started thinking, 'Wait, let's start treating them like just basic products, like there's a design flaw that's causing harm.'"
The legal team claims that Omegle could have become a "hunting ground for predators" because of the random matching system and the lack of warnings or age verification.
They hope to test this in a trial that could provide Alice with millions of dollars in damages and forced changes to Omegle's design.
Legal experts agree that the case is a potential turning point.
"If the AM v. Omegle case goes to trial and is successful, I think it could pave the way for many other victims to come forward with other similar cases," says Dr. Lisa Lovdal Gormsen.
She is currently trying to suing the owner of Facebook Targeted in high-profile litigation - a profile of a UK unfair competition class action.
Any changes resulting from such lawsuits, in the US or elsewhere, would benefit website users worldwide.
Omegle could also face legal action in the UK if the government's long-delayed internet safety legislation is finally passed.
The bill proposes that companies be fined large sums if they fail to protect children from harm.
In search of Omegle's creator
Omegle's legal team argued in court that the website was not to blame for what happened to Alice and denies that it is a haven for predators, but I've seen Omegle mentioned in more than 50 cases against pedophiles in the last two years alone.
There were more than 20 in the US, with others in the UK, Australia, Spain, Colombia and Cyprus.
The website's retired creator, Leif Brooks, didn't want to talk about Alice's case via email, so I traveled to his home in Orlando, Florida, hoping to talk to him there—but again, he remained silent.
The Internet Watch Foundation also tried to talk to Brooks about the changes to his site.
The charity, which removes child sexual abuse content from the internet, told the BBC that its analysts deal with around 20 Omegle videos a week.
Brooks sent a statement to the BBC.
In it, he said that Omegle users are "solely responsible for their own conduct" while using its website.
He added that Omegl took user safety extremely seriously, with moderation by artificial intelligence and human moderators, and helped law enforcement and organizations working to stop online child exploitation.
It is true that the child abusers were convicted after Omegle handed over their IP addresses to the police.
Meanwhile, Brooks made a small change to his own website.
Weeks after being notified of Alice's legal action, a box appeared on Omegle that users must tick to indicate they are over 18 before they can access it.
But Alice's legal team says that is "not enough".
Alice herself says that she would like Omegle to close.
"I don't think it does enough good to destroy children's lives," she says.
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