A Michigan man who ran chat rooms and Discord servers targeting children playing online games and coercing them into self-harm, sexually explicit acts, suicide, and other violence was sentenced to 30 years in prison Thursday.

According to the US Department of Justice, Richard Densmore was a member of an online terrorist network called 764, which the FBI considers a "tier one" terrorist threat. He pled guilty to sexual exploitation of a child as "part of a broader indictment that charged him with other child exploitation offenses." In the DOJ's press release, FBI Director Christopher Wray committed to bring to justice any abusive groups known to be preying on vulnerable kids online.

“This defendant orchestrated a community to target children through online gaming sites and used extortion and blackmail to force his minor victims to record themselves committing acts of self-harm and violence,” Wray said. “If you prey on children online, you can’t hide behind a keyboard. The FBI will use all our resources and authorities to arrest you and hold you accountable.”

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Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III loved interacting with Character.AI's hyper-realistic chatbots—with a limited version available for free or a "supercharged" version for a $9.99 monthly fee—most frequently chatting with bots named after his favorite Game of Thrones characters.

Within a month—his mother, Megan Garcia, later realized—these chat sessions had turned dark, with chatbots insisting they were real humans and posing as therapists and adult lovers seeming to directly spur Sewell to develop suicidal thoughts. Within a year, Setzer "died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head," a lawsuit Garcia filed Wednesday said.

As Setzer became obsessed with his chatbot fantasy life, he disconnected from reality, her complaint said. Detecting a shift in her son, Garcia repeatedly took Setzer to a therapist, who diagnosed her son with anxiety and disruptive mood disorder. But nothing helped to steer Setzer away from the dangerous chatbots. Taking away his phone only intensified his apparent addiction.

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