How A Nintendo Switch Helped Rescue A Missing Teenager 500 Miles From Home

Nintendo records helped the FBI find a girl who'd run away from Virginia to Arizona. If she hadn't turned her Switch on she may never have been found.

Last August, Jane, a 14-year-old from Norfolk, Virginia, went missing for two weeks. Her worried family, who put out urgent pleas to local media, were baffled by the girl's disappearance. An introvert and a homebody, Jane (whose real name Forbes is choosing not to reveal as she is still a minor) had showed no sign she was considering something drastic, her parents told investigators.

While local volunteers put out fliers asking for information on Jane's whereabouts, and the case escalated from local to federal law enforcement, there was a strong indication she was alive. Nine days after her friends had last seen her, they noticed activity on Jane's Nintendo Switch account. She’d watched hours of YouTube and downloaded a game, Little Nightmares. When the FBI learned about the activity, agents sent an "exigent" request to Nintendo, asking for data about Jane's account. Tech companies often receive such requests, though because such data demands are not signed off by a judge, the companies aren't legally required to respond. Many do, if they’re given a full explanation as to the exigency of the case.

In this case, Nintendo returned information on the wifi networks to which the Switch had connected. That gave the FBI a starting point, allowing them to get data from the internet provider Cox Communications, which included an IP address and a physical location in Tolleson, Arizona. The cops carried out surveillance on the property before entering the building and finding Jane, hundreds of miles from home.

Inside, they also found a 28-year-old man, Ethan Roberts, whom Jane had met on Omegle. Having spent months interacting and sending sexually explicit images to one another, Roberts traveled to Norfolk via a Greyhound bus, picked Jane up and took her back across America to his apartment. In interviews with police, his victim said that once in Arizona, he’d tried to get her to go back on Omegle, meet individuals and sell them nude images. This April, Roberts was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the production of child sexual abuse material.

Nintendo hadn't responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

An Omegle spokesperson said that while "users are solely responsible for their behavior while using the website, Omegle has voluntarily implemented content moderation services that use both AI tools and human moderators. Content flagged as illegal, inappropriate or in violation of Omegle's policies can lead to a number of actions, including reports to appropriate law enforcement agencies."

The case shows the flip side of tech companies holding information that can be used to quickly locate an individual. While there's plenty of concern about the impact on the average person's privacy from the mass data collection, in this case, Jane may never have been found if she hadn't taken her Nintendo Switch with her across the country and the games giant wasn't tracking her wifi usage.

Read the search warrant in full here.

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