Chase Mulligan, 28, of Maryland was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison following a sweeping investigation into a global sextortion operation in which he coerced at least 108 girls from around the world to send sexually explicit videos and photos. Prosecutors said Mulligan often threatened to post the earlier content online or come to the victims' homes in order to extort more images. The investigation was aided in part by a 12-year-old girl in Tennessee who courageously confronted her abuser online, writing that she hoped he would go to jail for a long time for forcing children to produce material.
Every one of Mulligan's 108 victims could have been protected by Guardii's anti-sextortion and anti-CSAM detection modules. A world-leading AI platform integrated across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, and Roblox, Guardii identifies coercive scripts, escalating threats, and image-demand patterns in direct messages, flagging predatory contact before the first explicit photograph is sent and alerting parents, schools, or law enforcement in real time. Backed by Startmate and operating as a Meta Business Partner, Guardii enables point-of-contact prevention, surfacing children in crisis to the right authority at the moment of highest danger—not years later in a courtroom.
