The Blue Whale Challenge is not a game at all. Unlike online games downloaded from PlayStore or iStore, the killer mission spreads through unmonitored chatting apps and social media platforms.

Victims of the perverse challenge meet their tormentors on social media. More and more people seek out administrators of the so-called game on social media and specific game forums. Self-proclaimed admins make themselves ready to lead the participants on the road to perdition.

They cast their net for gullible people on chat forums. They send a seemingly innocent link first. The victim is hooked the moment he clicks on the link. A list of weird tasks follows. By now, the Blue Whale admins have full control of their victims’ online life. They wreck the target’s mental state with incessant chatting. They have the participants eating out of their hands. They just have to tell the participants to go and kill themselves.

'Killer game'

The 'killer game' has claimed the lives of at least six teens in India in the last fortnight, the latest being a teenager from Thiruvananthapuram. Manoj, aged 16, committed suicide on July 26.

Manoj’s mother Anu, a software engineer, has invaluable insights to share into the secretive world of online persuasion. Anu remembers that her son’s activities had become strange in the months ahead of his suicide. He had told her about the game. He had gone through the instructions of the game and downloaded it.

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Though Anu dissuaded Manoj from playing the deadly game, he might have gone ahead nevertheless, she suspects. There was a palpable change in the boy’s behavior since November, she said. She confirmed her doubts about the causes of her son’s suicide after reading reports about the global scare associated with the Blue Whale Challenge.

Visits to cemetery

Manoj never went anywhere alone but the game changed the pattern. He used to go for movies alone. Later, Anu realized that he was lying to her. His actual destination was a cemetery. When she confronted him, he said he merely wanted to check if the cemeteries had negative or positive energy.

Manoj started watching horror movies and visiting mourning families. Death had become a leitmotif in his life.

He had gone to the Shankhumukham beach once. He went to the sea alone but told her folks that he was going with friends. He scratched the letters ‘ABI’ to his hand with a pointed object in January. He persuaded a friend to brand him with the unexplained letters.

Manoj did not know how to swim but he jumped into a whirlpool in a river and got a friend to videotape it on his mobile phone.

The teen drifted apart from his parents in nine months. He kept awake until 5 am and slept through 11 am. He attributed his lack of sleep to late-night chatting with friends. His parents later realized that he was not chatting with any of his friends. The person on the other end of the chat must by a Blue Whale admin, his parents now believe.

Manoj never shared anything with friends but he had asked his mother if she would be pained if we went away. He wanted Anu to overcome the grief and love his sister more. Anu told him not to entertain such thoughts.

Anu says Manoj was tech-savvy. She had told him about software and applications. He had been using phone and computers since he was in the seventh standard and the family did not think that the cyberworld would claim his life one day.

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