Momo: The New Fear Factor

After the Blue Whale, a new challenge and fear factor has come up with Momo Challenge.  Like Blue Whale Challenge, Momo is a horror game run on the Android platform. It is spreading rapidly through social media and smartphone, targeting teenagers to perform a number of tasks until they commit suicide.

The victims receive a message with a graphic, threatening them to perform a series of dangerous tasks.

Anyone who has set up an account receives repetitive threats of making his or her personal information public and inflicting harm on family members unless he or she performs the tasks assigned to him or her one after another. Many times, it takes the full control of a smartphone (like TeamViewer- a piece of software used for internet-based remote access and support), turning its camera, microphone and other features on. Thus, the super admin of this game can keep a close look at the victims.

The motive behind developing this type of horror game

Not at all Blue Whale and Momo Challenge is an aimless approach to kill teenagers randomly. There are betting groups behind these, paying the developers or the game development companies for their success to motivate the victims to reach each step one after another. Thus, they are making a million dollars, motivating people to commit suicide and watching the live streaming of it for their locations.

The undeniable fact is that it is not the brainchild of a developer alone. These are a group of people supporting him from behind and getting their logic implemented technically. Logic is the base of developing a game or an app. Therefore, there must be highly qualified psychologists and psychoanalysts selling them for arranging everything in logical orders so that the developer can write code accordingly and technically implement their logic of motivating teenagers easily.

Not only does the developing company keeping developers and psychoanalysts to build this type of game but also they are keeping digital marketers and data analysts to collect data about the people (especially the teenagers), using different analytics, call to action buttons, and different touch points. The collected data help the psychologists and psychoanalysts to study and understand the mental condition of a person and target him or her according to the study report.

How to prevent this type horror game

• Social media and WhatsApp should be very active and prompt in implementing filtering system in the message and chatting system so that no message including the texts and images of Momo and Blue Whale can go through their systems. As soon as they will get to know about anything like this type of deadly game, they should implement a filtering system so that any message having the words and phrases like “Momo” and “Blue Whale” can go to another person through their message and chatting system.

• The government of each country should be supersensitive so that no group or an organized body can take a chance of putting their heads together and creating this type of a deadly game. 

• Each government should start some protocols on the use of WhatsApp and other social media sites.

• Both the governments and concerned agencies should create awareness about these games and the undermining risks of playing this type of game.

• One (using WhatsApp and Social Media) should not accept an invitation to play this game; rather he or she should block the sender as soon as possible.

• An online user should read the terms and conditions critically before installing any app and allowing it to access some information from your mobile.

• As “Google Play Store” and “App Store” do not approve this type of app, the blackmailers create a link and ask the targeted person to follow it. As soon as he or she clicks on it is downloaded to his or her device. Therefore, WhatsApp users should not click on a link unless they know the senders very well.