For all its good intentions of helping connect with cool strangers, Omegle had a problem with online child safety. Earlier this year, a person was sentenced to 16 years for eliciting sexual materials from underage girls as young as seven years of age over the course of three years on Omegle. BBC also highlighted more than 50 cases of sexual abuse involving minors across the world that took place on Omegle since 2021. Among them was a woman who was targeted when she was only 11 and later proceeded to sue Omegle in 2023.
A UN Special Rapporteur investigation in 2021 found multiple minors engaged in sexual activities on Omegle and how the website easily connected underage users with adults. In 2020, The New York Times also highlighted the prevalence of sexual and pornographic content on Omegle.
When Australia’s national regulator for online safety reached out to Omegle regarding the safety aspects, the company revealed that it only employed three human moderators for video chats and one moderator for text chats. The report, which was published by e-Safety in 2022, also mentioned that Omegle offers no in-service option to report abuse, there was no age check tool save for a consent checkbox that anyone could click, and there were no measures in place to stop minors from connecting with adult bad actors.