STARKVILLE — By all accounts, Walker Montgomery was the last person anyone would expect to die from suicide.
“Walker was just a normal kid,” his father Brian Montgomery told The Dispatch. “He wasn’t on social media hardly any. … He loved farming. He loved football, had a great social life.”
Walker took his own life when he was 16 in December 2022, after falling victim to an online sexual extortion scheme, also known as sextortion.
Financially motivated sextortion involves an offender coercing a minor to create and send explicit materials. The offender then threatens to share the materials unless they receive payment from the victim, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Tragically, Walker’s story is not unique. In 2023 alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 26,718 reports of financial sextortion from electronic service providers and the public, up from the 10,731 received in 2022.
In April, two brothers were extradited from Nigeria and pleaded guilty to running an international sextortion ring that resulted in the suicide of a 17-year-old boy in Michigan.
After learning the details of his son’s death, Brian Montgomery started working to educate others about sextortion. He spent months speaking to schools and churches and talking to parents whose children were in the same situation.
“After losing Walker, we knew that there wasn’t enough being done to try to spread awareness and hold tech companies accountable to the harms that their platforms are causing,” he said. “We just felt like we had to do something and prevent other families from having to go through that tragedy.”
A legislative victory
Working with several legislators, including District 15 Sen. Bart Williams and District 43 Rep. Rob Roberson, both Republicans from Starkville, Brian saw two laws pass this session that aim to prevent more stories like Walker’s.
The Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act lays out protections for minors using social media, including requiring age verification or parental consent to set up an account. Walker’s Law criminalizes sexual extortion and aggravated sexual extortion.
It was a victory for the Montgomery family.
“For our family, to be able to make a difference in the culture around us and hopefully to have some impact and prevent this from happening to other families, that’s huge,” Brian said.
Both laws were supposed to go into effect on July 1. But this month, NetChoice, a trade association of online businesses, sued the state on the basis of free speech, claiming the Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act “violates privacy and stifles the free exchange of ideas” by mandating age verification and parental consent for digital services.
NetGear includes companies like Google, Etsy and X, formerly known as Twitter. The organization advocates for free expression and enterprise on the internet and currently has six active First Amendment lawsuits over state-level internet regulations.
Neither Brian nor Williams were surprised by the lawsuit. Williams said lawmakers had intentionally worked with technology companies to prevent one from happening.
“They’re claiming First Amendment violations of freedom of speech which is something that we were aware (might happen) when we created the bill,” Williams told The Dispatch. “That’s why we tried to work with industry and find language that they could live with.”
Williams feels optimistic about the state prevailing in the lawsuit. He said the need for laws like these has become increasingly evident.
“There’s actually a structure that’s out there that’s teaching people how to do this,” he said. “… They know what to say, how to say it and how to do it. In Walker’s case, it was a three-hour scenario from the time this started to the time the young man took his life, and they just took him to a place that was unimaginable.”
‘That knowledge can save lives’
Brian hopes legislation on the subject will continue to evolve as the public learns more about sextortion. But raising awareness is just as important, he said. Both he and Roberson agreed it starts with educating parents.
“My first line of defense is to make sure that parents understand that if their kid has got a cell phone or access to the internet, it needs to be something that we’re aware of and that we’re watching,” Roberson told The Dispatch.
Brian said he has spoken with hundreds of parents whose children also fell victim to online sextortion. He encourages all parents to engage with the possibility of it happening to their own children because it’s not going away.
“In the most likely scenario, if Walker would have just blocked them and walked away, they never would have shared anything, but he didn’t know that,” he said. “That knowledge is everything. That knowledge can save lives.”
The next step, Brian said, is implementing regulations on social media companies to ensure child users are safe.
“We want our kids to be able to communicate,” he said. “We want them to be able to have that freedom to express themselves and be who they are, but they’ve got to be able to do it in a safe place.”
Placing regulations on tech companies, like requiring age verification and parental consent, won’t only protect minors from online sextortion but from other digital crimes as well, Brian said.
“This particular scheme, the last two or three years, has kind of been evolving to where it is now,” he said. “But what’s the scheme for today? If we’re not engaged, and we’re not paying attention, and we’re not getting support from tech (companies) to try to prohibit those activities, we just can’t stay ahead of it because the predators are going to keep working.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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