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“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.” That’s the kind of thing Philipp Budeikin tells young girls while he’s convincing them to take their own lives at the end stages of The Blue Whale Challenge, a social media “game” he created.
Philipp Budeikin of “Blue Whale”
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The 21-year-old Russian has now confessed to manipulating 16 girls into killing themselves in his sick, diabolical scheme. Budeikin claims he is “cleansing society” from the “biological waste” of people who were “happy to die.”
Diana Kuznetsova, 16, committed suicide by jumping from a building after The Blue Whale Challenge.
Authorities in Russia say there could be as many as 160 victims and the game is spreading to the U.S. 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.
In an interview from jail, Budeikin admitted to setting up social media with “depressive content that puts an individual in the right mood” before children are admitted to “private communities” online “where everything is happening.”
“The game begins. You need to do tasks, tell about yourself, communicate,” he said.” Then I Skype with the person, put her in trance and learn some things from their life after which I make my decision.
“At some point it is necessary to push the teenager not to sleep at night. (In this way their) psyche becomes more susceptible to influence.
“There were a lot of imitators, which annoys me,” said Budeikin.
Budeikin was asked if he really pushed teenagers to their deaths. “Yes,” he said, “I truly was doing that. “They were dying happy. I was giving them what they didn’t have in real life: warmth, understanding, connections.”
Eventually exhausted and confused, they are told to commit suicide.
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.
When he started the game in 2012, Budeikin said his task was to attract as many children as possible, then figure out those who would be the most affected by psychological manipulation.
Anton Breido, a senior official from the Russian Investigative Committee, seen as an equivalent of the FBI told The Daily Mail that Budeikin and other Blue Whale administrators, “gathered the children, then offered simple tasks which for some children were too boring or weird to complete. 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 did literally everything to stay in. One of the troubles for us was that 15 children who committed suicide at the administrator’s orders were told to delete all correspondence in their social media accounts, which they all did.”
One girl who reached the final stages of Blue Whale said that if she “wrote saying she wanted to leave, she received abuse and threats from the administrator. He shamed me for being weak, and not feeling bad enough about my life.”
