Twenty-one-year-old Philipp Budeikin has boastfully confessed to manipulating 16 young girls into committing suicide. Budeikin, now behind bars in Russia, created an online “game” called “The Blue Whale Challenge,” where children are preyed upon, asked to complete disturbing tasks and eventually coaxed into taking their own lives. The Russian claims the “game” is a moral good, “cleansing society” of “biological waste.” Budeikin insists the schoolgirls he manipulated into suicide were “happy to die.”
The Daily Mail reports:
The lethal game called Blue Whale involves brainwashing vulnerable teenagers over a period of 50 days, urging them to complete tasks from watching horror movies to waking at strange hours, and self harming.
Eventually exhausted and confused, they are told to commit suicide, and it is feared in Russia that dozens have done so at the bidding of Budeikin or other ‘mentors’.
In total, Blue Whale has reportedly manipulated as many as 160 youths into taking their own lives, a majority of whom are young females. As noted by Heat Street, Russian officials have warned that the game is spreading to the United States. “This week, school officials in Alabama warned parents to monitor their kids’ social media habits after finding evidence that some students were playing Blue Whale.”
“Two school girls Yulia Konstantinova, 15, and Veronika Volkova, 16, fell to their deaths in February after it is believed they were involved in Blue Whale,” reports The Daily Mail. On Christmas in 2015, a 12-year-old named Angelina Davydova jumped off the 14th floor of a building, taking her life just 50 days after engaging in Blue Whale. The girl was said to have become obsessed with her weight, only eating “light salads” prior to the suicide. Diana Kuznetsova, only 16 years of age, “died after jumping from a nine story building in Ryazan.”
Yulia Konstantinova, age 15
Angelina Davydova, age 12
And the list, sadly, goes on.
Senior official from Russia’s Investigative Committee Anton Breido told The Daily Mail how the twisted “game” came about, whom it targeted and how it worked.
“[Philipp] started in 2013 and ever since he has polished his tactics and corrected his mistakes. Philipp and his aides at first attracted children into VK (social media) groups by using mega-scary videos,” said Breido. “Their task was to attract as many children as possible, then figure out those who would be the most affected by psychological manipulation. Say, out of 20,000 people, they knew ‘their’ audience would be only 20 people. ‘Biological waste’ is how death group administrators referred to children they pushed to commit suicide.”
The official continued: “They gathered the children, then offered simple tasks which for some children were too boring or weird to complete,” he said. “These ones were clearly too strong to be manipulated. Those who stayed were given much stronger tasks like cutting their veins, to balance on a roof top, to kill an animal and post a video or pictures to prove it. Most children left at this stage. A small group that was left who obediently went through all the tasks, with teenagers being physiologically ready to follow whatever the administrators told them, no matter how strange or scary the tasks. They felt their position in the group was so precious that they did literally everything to stay in. One of the troubles for us was that 15 children who committed suicide at administrator’s orders were told to delete all correspondence in their social media accounts, which they all did.”
One young girl who escaped the clutches of the “game” in its final stage explained her experience.
“It was middle of a night, my alarm rang, I woke up and got straight to my phone,” said the young, unnamed girl. “I had to watch videos with pictures flicking every two seconds of teenagers jumping off roofs, close ups of bodies, bloodied mouths, pools of blood under bodies. It was accompanied by very unpleasant, haunting music with screams of animals and pets, and cries like children were being tortured. I felt so awful after watching them I wanted to do something physical to either myself or somebody, to kill, to destroy.”
The girl says she was inundated with threats from administrators whenever she told them she wanted to leave Blue Whale.
“He shamed me for being weak, and not feeling bad enough about my life,” she said. “I had to watch until the administrator commanded me to stop and ordered me to erase everything.”
Budeikin would reportedly tell young girls: “Do something beautiful at least once in your life, he was saying, it is so good to die young. Life is awful, it will not get better. You are rare, a selected one.”
“Budeikin may still be playing his games, Russian law permits him to communicate with teenage girls who send him their contact information in jail. Authorities say he has been inundated with love letters from teenage girls,” notes Heat Street.
