Omegle Closes Down Amid Controversies and Lawsuit Settlement
The online site Omegle, which randomly paired users in video calls in the hope of forging unexpected friendships between strangers, has shut down after 14 years.
The founder, Leif K-Brooks, in a statement (or really, a rather lengthy farewell letter) posted on the site, attributed the shutdown to sustained attacks by critics exploiting the actions of a malicious subset of users.
In recent years, Omegle faced legal scrutiny as it became associated with instances of pedophiles exploiting the platform to target minors.
The closure follows a recent settlement of a civil claim filed in an Oregon court, where an unnamed plaintiff who was only identified as A.M., alleged that Omegle paired an 11-year-old with an adult man who sexually abused her for three years. This lawsuit, filed in 2021, revealed that the accused had already pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography in a criminal case.
A separate case in August resulted in a Virginia man, Anthony Benton, being sentenced to 16 years in federal prison after admitting to engaging with at least 1,000 girls on Omegle and recording explicit videos. Prosecutors disclosed that Benton had communicated with girls aged 7 to 17 over three years, starting in 2020.
In the letter, K-Brooks talked proudly about the platform’s original goal to connect strangers. But he also acknowledged that it had been misused, “including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes,” but he argued that the attempts to shut it down were disproportionate to its value.
“A physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there,” he said.
K-Brooks, who claimed in the letter that he believed “in a responsibility to be a ‘good Samaritan’, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse,” said that the platform was no longer financially or psychologically sustainable.
“The stress and expense of this fight — coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse — are simply too much,” K-Brooks said. “Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically.”
According to 404 Media, the site was taken down on Wednesday, November 8, just days after the Oregon civil claim was settled.
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