Jimmy Wu has been a gamer his whole life, and he figured it was something he could pass down. His 12-year-old daughter picked it up. She also started talking with people she met through Discord and Roblox, and Wu says those people pushed her toward hurting herself. The person messaging her turned out to be a minor too, talking the way kids her age talk, which is exactly why it slipped past him.
“You don’t, I guess, realize how prevalent it is until it affects your own family,” Wu said.
What the FBI is asking families to do about it costs nothing and takes about an hour. Get inside your kid’s online life tonight. Know every app and game on the device, know the usernames and the passwords, and know who is talking to them. Agents say the single biggest thing putting kids in reach of these groups is a child with a device and nobody looking.
Start With The Passwords, And Write Them Down
High on the bureau’s list for parents is access: know and keep the passwords to every phone, tablet and computer in the house, spot-check the devices to see what apps are on them and what is being downloaded, and pay attention to who is communicating with your child and what is being said.
Anish Shukla, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Columbia field office in South Carolina, named the one factor that puts kids at risk: “Unrestricted, unsupervised access to the Internet by children.” His instruction to parents was just as blunt. “Parents absolutely must be involved in their children’s online activities, having a sense of what they’re doing, who they’re talking to, what apps or games they’re playing,” he said.
Do it as a paper exercise, not a phone one. Sit down with your kid, open the device, and write out every account, username and password on a single sheet. Tape it inside a kitchen cabinet door or drop it in the file box with the birth certificates. Then scroll the whole app drawer, not just the home screen. Apps get buried in folders, and some hide behind icons that look like a calculator or a notes app.
Kill The Wi-Fi At Night And Get Phones Out Of Bedrooms
Two of the FBI’s plainest suggestions for families are setting limits on internet use and shutting down the Wi-Fi overnight. Agents also tell parents to keep phones out of children’s bedrooms at night and out of bathrooms, where kids are more likely to be talked into taking private photos.
Build a charging station somewhere public and make it the house rule. A multi-port USB charger and a basket from Walmart or Dollar Tree, parked on the kitchen counter, is the whole setup. Phones go in the basket after dinner. Parents’ phones too, because a rule that only applies to the 13-year-old lasts about nine days.
For the Wi-Fi itself, most modern routers have an app with a schedule or a pause button, and the newer mesh systems let you pause by device. If yours is older and has none of that, a basic outlet timer from Home Depot plugged in behind the router does the same job for a few dollars. Set it to cut at 10 p.m. and come back at 6 a.m. Remember that phones on cell data ignore your router entirely, which is another reason the basket matters more than the router settings.
Set Every Account To Private, Then Check Again Every Month
Social media privacy settings should be at the strictest level the platform allows, and the FBI tells kids directly to keep accounts private, block or ignore messages from people they don’t know, and stop talking to anyone who makes them uncomfortable. One red flag the bureau tells children to watch for: somebody they met on one app pushing them to move the conversation to a different platform.
Parental controls are worth turning on. Screen Time on an iPhone and Family Link on Android both let you approve app downloads and set limits, and the FBI recommends using controls where they exist. They are a speed bump, not a lock. Settings get reset after updates, kids find workarounds, and no control catches a friendly stranger inside a game chat.
Delaying social media as long as you can is also on the FBI’s list, along with knowing who your child is talking to in games. Put a recurring reminder on your phone for the first Saturday of the month and re-check the settings then. Ten minutes, once a month.
Google Your Own Kid Before Somebody Else Does
Christopher Delzotto, special agent in charge of FBI Las Vegas, suggests parents search their children’s identifiers and see what comes back. “Parents can Google their children’s identifiers and see, ‘Hey, is there information publicly available? Who put that online?'” he said. Run the full name, the gamer tags, the usernames, the old email address. Search images too.
A lot of what shows up, parents posted themselves. Joe Zadik, a supervisory special agent with the FBI, pointed at the back-to-school photo as an example: a child’s full name, age and teacher’s name are the sort of details that end up on the chalkboard sign in the picture, and predators use them to learn more about the child. School name, bus number and the daily routine go the same way.
Crop the sign out, or skip the sign. Turn off location tagging for the camera and for social apps so photos stop carrying your address in the file. Cover laptop cameras when they are not in use; a strip of electrical tape works, and slide covers come in multipacks for a couple of bucks.
The Warning Signs Agents Keep Repeating
Sudden mood or behavior changes top the list, along with withdrawal, changes in eating and sleeping, unexplained injuries, signs of self-harm, harm to a younger sibling, cruelty to animals, openly talking about death, and unexplained gifts showing up at the house. Delzotto adds a sudden obsession with gore, and marks or signatures carved into skin.
Two signs are easy to miss because they do not look like a kid problem at all. One is a report that your child’s personal information has been posted online. The other is unexpected texts or calls about your child from numbers you don’t recognize.
Alan Karr, special agent in charge of FBI Milwaukee, wrote in an open letter released April 22 that the threats children face online are real and growing, and that awareness, vigilance and cooperation can stop predators before they cause harm. The same letter listed fresh cuts, patterned scars and a child hiding parts of the body among the physical signs worth a second look.
These Are Not The Predators You Were Warned About
In South Carolina, every investigation into a violent online network over the past year involved minor victims, and in 75% of those cases the perpetrators were also minors. That field office has seen a 380% increase in cases involving these networks between 2025 and 2026.
The networks go by 764, Harm Notion and The Com, among other names, according to Jason Hudson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Houston field office. Victims are typically between the ages of 10 and 17. Nationwide, the FBI says complaints involving these kinds of online predator encounters have climbed 600% since the bureau started tracking them roughly two years ago.
Delzotto said in September that more than 500 764 offshoot subjects are under investigation across all 56 field offices, and he was candid about the math. “The reality is the FBI and other federal agencies cannot keep up with the number of referrals we are getting,” he said. Sextortion drives a lot of that volume: the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center took in more than 75,000 submissions involving sextortion in 2025 and referred more than 5,700 cases involving minors to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
If Something Already Happened, Delete Nothing
The instinct is to wipe the messages. Don’t. The FBI tells parents to preserve the evidence instead: keep the texts, emails and chats, take screenshots, and write down usernames, email addresses, websites and platform names.
Do not try to handle the predator yourself. Contact local police, call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), or file a report at ic3.gov. Anyone in immediate danger should call local law enforcement first. If your child talks about hurting themselves, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children runs a service called Take It Down that helps remove or stop the spread of explicit images taken when a person was under 18, at no cost, and its NetSmartz resources are online at missingkids.org.
The Conversation That Makes All Of It Work
Shame and fear are what keep kids quiet, which is why these cases run for months before a parent finds out. Jason Carley, special agent in charge of FBI Jacksonville, said parents and guardians should stay engaged in their children’s digital activity and reinforce good online habits. Zadik described how it starts: “It often starts with what seems like an innocent interaction.”
Tell your kid out loud that they can come to you no matter what they did or sent, and that they will not lose the phone for telling you. A child who expects to be punished for reporting will not report. Shukla said agents hear a version of the same sentence from parents over and over when they finally show up: “We knew something was wrong, but we didn’t know what to do.”
Knowing what to do is the easy part, and it is the least exciting advice in this article. Open the phone tonight. Write down the accounts. Put the charger in the kitchen. The parents who find out early are the ones who were already looking.
