BLUE Whale is a twisted suicide challenge that appears to goad vulnerable teens into killing themselves.
The dangerous game has been linked to at least 130 teen deaths in Russia and police in the UK have now started warning parents about the challenge.
What is the Blue Whale online suicide game?
The Blue Whale Game is an Internet urban legend first mentioned in Russia in 2013. It is allegedly an existing game which consists of a series of tasks assigned to players by administrators during a 50-day period, with the final challenge requiring the player to commit suicide.[2] It was first run by teenagers as a joke, linked by them with real suicide cases, but became popular among teenagers in 2016 after a journalist with a loose understanding of Internet culture published an article which caused moral panic in Russian society and listed (questionably) real victims
The Blue Whale suicide game is believed to be an online social media group which is encouraging people to kill themselves.
There are hundreds of thousands of posts relating to the sick trend on Instagram.
It’s thought a group administrator assigns daily tasks to members, which they have to complete over 50 days.
The horrific tasks include self-harming, watching horror movies and waking up at unusual hours, but these gradually get more extreme.
On the 50th day, the controlling manipulators behind the game reportedly instruct the youngsters to commit suicide.
The NSPCC say children should remember not to follow the crowd and not feel pressured into doing anything that makes them feel unsafe.
A spokesperson said: “Children can find it difficult to stand up to peer pressure but they must know it’s perfectly okay to refuse to take part in crazes that make them feel unsafe or scared.
“Parents should talk with their children and emphasise that they can make their own choices and discuss ways of how to say no.
“Reassuring a child that they can still be accepted even if they don’t go along with the crowd will help stop them doing something that could hurt them or make them uncomfortable.”
How many teenage deaths have been linked to Blue Whale in Russia?
Police are said to be probing a number of suicides across Russia which they fear are linked to the online craze.
But as of yet the Blue Whale game has not been proven to be directly responsible for any deaths.
Investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported: “We have counted 130 suicides of children that took place between November 2015 to April 2016.
“Almost all these children were members of the same internet groups and lived in good, happy families.”
Two schoolgirls Yulia Konstantinova, 15, and Veronika Volkova, 16, fell to their deaths from the roof of a 14-storey apartment block.
Another unnamed 15-year-old girl was also critically injured after falling onto snowy ground from a fifth floor flat in the city of Krasnoyarsk, also Siberia.Two days earlier, a 14-year-old girl from Chita was reported to have thrown herself under a commuter train.
A 13-year-old boy was also saved from killing himself after he was spotted perching on the edge of a roof in Lviv, Ukraine.
Yulia left a note saying “End” on her social media page after she posted a picture of a big blue whale.
A family raced to stop a 15-year-old girl from killing herself, with the young girl reportedly now recovering in a hospital in Barcelona.
The Russian parliament proposed a bill bringing about criminal responsibility for the creation of pro-suicide groups on social media. This will need to be signed by President Vladimir Putin and would see those who incited others to commit suicide jailed for up to four years.
