The parents of a 16-year-old who took his own life after he fell victim to a sextortion gang on Instagram are suing Meta for the alleged wrongful death of their son, in the first UK case of its kind.

Murray Dowey died in December 2023 at his family home in Dunblane, after being tricked into sending intimate pictures to an Instagram contact. He thought it was a girl his own age, but it turned out to be overseas criminals involved in financially motivated sexual extortion.

Speaking as the lawsuit was filed in Delaware, where Meta Platforms is incorporated, Murray’s parents Ros and Mark said: “We know what we’re up against. But it’s time social media companies took accountability for what they’ve done to our young people.

“It’s not just sextortion, they’re causing multiple harms, and they’ve been allowed to get away with it.”

The lawsuit was filed in Delaware superior court by the US-based Social Media Victims Law Center on behalf of the Doweys, as well as the family of Levi Maciejewski, a 13-year-old from Pennsylvania who was also a victim of sextortion.

It states that the boys’ deaths were “the foreseeable result of Meta’s design decisions and repeated refusals to implement affordable, available and identified safety features due to Meta’s prioritisation of engagement over user safety”.

According to the complaint, these design flaws include “collection of personal data without informed consent”, and use of that data to program recommendation products “it knew [were] operating in a manner that recommended teen Instagram users to sextortionists who Meta itself already had identified as predators”.

The suit alleges Meta’s “failure to safeguard user privacy, including through its continued sharing of Follower and Following data … even after Meta knew that this engagement-focused product feature was resulting in sextortion-related deaths of teen users across the world”.

It also contends that Meta made “false and misleading statements designed to convince children and parents that Instagram was safe for teens at the same time that internal testing showed that Instagram was matchmaking children to adult predators”.

While four British parents are suing TikTok for the alleged wrongful deaths of their children as a result of attempting the viral “blackout challenge” in 2021, this is the first UK case to centre on the crime of sextortion. Cases have risen sharply in recent years across the UK, US and Australia, with teenage boys and young men typically the victims of loosely organised cybercriminal gangs often based in south-east Asia and west Africa.

Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that children as young as 11 to 13 were being targeted for the first time, as criminals behind extortion attempts cast their nets wider in an attempt to trap victims.

The Doweys’ lawyer, Matthew Bergman, who set up the Social Media Victims Law Center in 2021, said that Meta was involved in all the US-based sextortion cases that he had filed to date.

“There are reasons for that. It is a product defect issue and Meta knows it. This complaint cites Meta records only recently made known to the public through [previous joint civil proceedings] and those documents make the deliberateness of these design defects, lack of safeguards, and failures to warn clear,” he said.

Reflecting on the two years since his son’s passing, Mark Dowey said: “Nothing’s really changed since Murray died. These predators can still get at our children.”

As well as their battle to hold Meta to account, Ros and Mark have regularly spoken out about the dangers of sextortion in the hope of raising awareness among parents and young people.

Ros said: “As a parent who has first-hand experience of how devastating the flaws can be, you have a duty to warn other parents. You think your kids are safe looking at pictures on Instagram and they’re not.”

Mark said that the lawsuit was “a way to get a wee bit of justice for Murray”: “There has to be accountability here because those statements are absolutely damning. [Meta] have known that their products are killing children by their unsafe design and they haven’t done anything about it. They chose to put profit before our young people.”

Instagram, which has previously condemned sextortion as a “horrific” crime, rolled out new safety features – which included preventing screenshots or screen recordings of disappearing images and videos – specifically to protect children from scammers in October 2024.

Speaking about the new features, Meta’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, said: “We have put in built-in protections so that parents do not have to do a thing to try and protect their teens.

“That said, this is the kind of adversarial crime where whatever protections we put in place, these extortion scammers are going to try and get around them.”

Meta has been approached for comment.

• In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org