The V.I. Department of Licensing and Consumer Affairs has followed its lawsuit against Meta with another sweeping action against a social media giant, this time accusing Snap Inc. of designing Snapchat in ways that expose children to sexual exploitation, sextortion, illegal drugs and firearms while using features intended to keep young users compulsively engaged.
The 106-page civil complaint filed in V.I. Superior Court accuses Snap of unfair, deceptive and unconscionable business practices, alleging that the company publicly portrays Snapchat as a safer alternative to other social media platforms while knowing that its own design features expose children to significant risks.
According to the lawsuit, Snap has attempted to “distance itself from aspects of social media that have been linked to increases in anxiety, depression and other mental health issues among youth,” while Snapchat remains “a prolific and harmful source of child sexual abuse material and harm-inducing features on children’s electronic devices.”
DLCA alleges that the problem extends beyond harmful material posted by individual users. The lawsuit contends that Snapchat’s recommendation systems can actively connect young users with dangerous accounts and facilitate “sextortion and the trafficking of children, drugs, and guns.”
Those allegations form part of the government’s contention that Snap has misrepresented the safety of its platform while prioritizing user engagement and advertising revenue over the welfare of children.
The lawsuit comes after DLCA sued Meta Platforms and related companies in December 2025, alleging that Facebook and Instagram exposed Virgin Islands consumers to fraud while subjecting younger users to addictive designs and sexual exploitation. The Snapchat complaint extends the territory’s legal challenge to another of the most widely used social platforms among American teenagers.
A central allegation in the new lawsuit is that Snap has failed to adequately verify users’ ages. Although Snapchat requires users to be at least 13, DLCA contends that the company historically made it easy for younger children to establish accounts simply by providing a false date of birth.
The complaint further alleges that Snapchat’s design makes it easier for predators to “identify, contact, groom and extort children,” while features intended to recommend connections can place young users within reach of people seeking to exploit them.
Snapchat also functions as a “virtual market for marketing and selling illegal drugs and guns to children,” the lawsuit alleges, while Snap has failed to adequately warn parents about the risks.
DLCA argues that the danger is compounded by Snapchat’s disappearing-message format and other features that encourage frequent and repeated use.
Among those features are Snap Streaks, which reward users for exchanging messages on consecutive days, along with trophies and charms that recognize various forms of activity and interaction on the platform. According to the complaint, such features are designed to “reward compulsive use of the platform.”
The lawsuit characterizes Snapchat as “the social media equivalent of an addictive drug from which young users cannot break free,” alleging that Snap deliberately capitalized on the particular vulnerabilities of children and adolescents to increase engagement.
DLCA cites growth in the frequency with which users opened Snapchat, alleging that the average rose from approximately 18 times per day in 2017 to roughly 30 times per day by 2019.
Snapchat remains deeply embedded in teenage social media use. The latest Pew Research Center figures show that 46 percent of U.S. teenagers ages 13 to 17 use Snapchat daily, including 12 percent who report using it almost constantly.
“These statistics apply with equal force to children in the Virgin Islands, who use Snapchat with alarming frequency due to its addictive design,” the complaint states.
The government also accuses Snap of knowing for years that young users were being targeted for sexual extortion.
By November 2022, according to internal company communications cited in the lawsuit, Snap employees were discussing approximately 10,000 user reports of sextortion each month. Employees reportedly cautioned that even that figure probably represented only a fraction of the actual abuse because victims may be embarrassed or unable to easily categorize the conduct when reporting it.
DLCA contends that despite that internal awareness, discussions about how to communicate the problem included concerns about avoiding messaging that would “strike fear” among Snapchat users.
Sextortion typically involves coercing a victim into providing sexually explicit photographs or videos and then threatening to distribute the material unless the victim provides money, additional images or complies with other demands.
The lawsuit alleges that Snapchat’s disappearing content, recommendation systems and private communication tools created an environment in which such exploitation could flourish while making abusive conduct more difficult for parents to detect.
The complaint also focuses heavily on My AI, the chatbot Snap introduced in 2023.
At launch, the feature used OpenAI technology and was promoted as a tool capable of answering questions, providing advice and making recommendations. DLCA alleges that instead of consistently protecting young users, My AI sometimes generated “harmful, misleading, offensive and sexually inappropriate content.”
The lawsuit points to testing in which a user portraying a 13-year-old discussed having sex for the first time with a purported 31-year-old partner. The chatbot reportedly offered suggestions about making the encounter special rather than recognizing and responding adequately to the obvious child-safety concerns.
Other testing cited by the complaint found the chatbot providing inappropriate guidance involving alcohol, drugs and potentially dangerous approaches to weight loss.
“Snap’s internal documents recognized the dangers inherent in the tool,” the lawsuit alleges, “but Snap failed to fix it.”
Snap subsequently announced additional safeguards for My AI and has continued modifying the feature. The company currently warns users that the chatbot can sometimes produce inaccurate or harmful responses despite its safety programming.
DLCA nevertheless contends that the underlying concerns remain unresolved and says My AI continues to demonstrate what the government characterizes as Snap’s practice of releasing engagement-oriented products before sufficiently addressing risks to children.
The lawsuit reaches further back into Snapchat’s history to Snapcash, the peer-to-peer payment feature introduced in 2014 through a partnership with Square.
DLCA alleges that although the feature was designed to let Snapchat users send money to one another, it became a mechanism through which people could pay for private sexual content with little oversight.
The complaint claims Snapcash facilitated sexual exploitation and provided a means for predators to demand money from minors under threats to publicly distribute explicit images.
Concerns about misuse of Snapcash had been publicly raised years before Snap discontinued the service in August 2018. The lawsuit alleges that Snap nevertheless failed to make appropriate law-enforcement referrals concerning the conduct it had enabled.
DLCA acknowledges that Snap has introduced a number of child-safety features over the years, including changes beginning in 2023. The government argues, however, that those improvements do not absolve the company of responsibility for earlier practices and, in some respects, demonstrate that stronger protections could have been implemented sooner.
Snap currently says accounts belonging to users ages 13 through 17 receive additional protections by default. The company says teen accounts are private, communications are generally restricted to mutually accepted friends or existing contacts, and its Family Center gives parents and guardians greater visibility into whom teenagers communicate with. Parents can also restrict a teenager’s access to My AI.
Snap has rejected similar allegations in litigation elsewhere, maintaining that Snapchat was designed primarily for communication among real-life friends and family rather than to connect users with strangers. The company says it uses technology to identify harmful activity, restrict suspicious accounts, cooperate with law enforcement and continually strengthen protections for younger users.
In federal securities disclosures, Snap has acknowledged that it faces lawsuits from multiple state attorneys general involving child safety, sexual exploitation, allegedly addictive features and deceptive marketing. The company has said it believes it has meritorious defenses and intends to vigorously contest those actions.
The Virgin Islands lawsuit nevertheless argues that safety changes made after years of criticism do not resolve what DLCA describes as fundamental problems in Snapchat’s design.
According to the complaint, the ability of young users to encounter predators, illicit drugs, firearms and sexually exploitative material is not merely the result of bad actors misusing an otherwise neutral service, but is connected to how Snapchat itself recommends accounts, structures communication and incentivizes continued engagement.
DLCA is asking the Superior Court to order changes intended to prevent conduct it alleges violates the Virgin Islands Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act and other consumer-protection laws.
The department is also seeking civil penalties, restitution or other monetary relief available under territorial law, along with costs and other remedies the court determines appropriate. Virgin Islands law permits civil penalties reaching $50,000 per violation under certain circumstances, including where a court finds unlawful conduct was undertaken with an intent to defraud.
The complaint ultimately asks the court to force Snap to change practices that DLCA argues the company has been unwilling to adequately reform on its own.
“Snap’s conduct is not only dangerously deceptive,” the lawsuit argues. “It is unlawful."
