A man in Ohio has been given a prison sentence for deceiving young girls into sending him explicit materials via Snapchat.
Joshua R. Glover, 36, of Elyria, Ohio, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison following his guilty plea.
While grooming his victims, Glover used the popular social media app Snapchat to solicit images of children engaging in sexual acts between January 2022 and January 2024, court documents reveal.
Glover managed to lure hundreds of young girls into sending him explicit imagery under the guise that he ran a modelling agency.
Victims would send him explicit images and videos as they believed that they would join Glover’s modelling agency and would eventually be paid for the explicit materials.
During the two-year period, Glover started around 18,000 chats with minor girls. He built relationships and trust with the young girls before gathering the child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Glover even offered to meet some of the girls in person to engage in sexual activities with them.
His typical age range was between 12 and 15 years old, and his victims spanned across the United States.
The predator admitted that he had received sexually explicit materials from 90 different girls.
Alongside the 18,000 separate chats found by authorities, law enforcement found 100 files of CSAM.
Snapchat has a serious predator problem
Snapchat has, in recent years, become a breeding ground for predatory behaviour due to its disappearing content features.
These features help people believe that what they’re sending and receiving will be wiped and all evidence will be erased. However, this is not the case.
Snapchat’s security has been brought into question, given previous cases, such as that of Reginald Adams, otherwise known as “Reggie Adams.”
He was sentenced to 22 months imprisonment and three years of supervised release for hacking into various women’s social media accounts and distributing his victims’ sensitive images.
Between 2020 and 2021, Adams exploited his victims by sending phishing messages from anonymous numbers posing as official Snapchat staff.
The women then provided their credentials, mainly security codes, which Adam could use to log into their accounts and reset their passwords.
Adams then hunted for sexually explicit content, which he would then download from his victims’ Snapchat accounts and share.
This case alone goes to show that Snapchat, despite having a large user base who are minors, seems to turn a blind eye to sexually explicit content being distributed on the platform.
Furthermore, Snapchat has been used by predators since its conception.
Ava Kris Tyson, a main character in the MrBeast universe, was confronted with grooming allegations after allegedly communicating with a minor via Snapchat.
Similarly, YouTuber James Charles was accused of sending and soliciting sexually explicit images from minors via Snapchat.
Data from the NSPCC found that of the 2,111 offences they reviewed where police could identify the platform used, 40% took place on Snapchat in 2025.
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