The Hull Daily Mail is reporting that an unknown offender messaged an 8-year-old girl on Musical.ly, and urged her to download the Live.ly app, where users can broadcast their videos live. Only pre-recorded videos can be posted on Musical.ly, which is popular among youth in the United States (and Arlington Heights).
The British school girl was innocently playing on the Musical.ly app in her bedroom with her 10-year-old friend when both friends began receiving messages from someone they didn’t know.
While they were dancing, the stranger, who the girls thought was a 14-year-old boy, began telling the girls they were beautiful and said ‘I love you’, before asking them to lift their tops up and show him their private parts. Then, without warning, a man appeared, covered his face and indecently exposed himself.
The daughter approached her mother in tears and told her what happened. The girl’s mom checked the message history for the app, and saw the offender had sent messages saying ‘Love you beautiful’ and ‘So excited to see your boobs, belly and (private parts)’. While reporting the incident to the Humberside Police, the girl’s mother was unable to turn over the video of the man exposing himself to police because videos broadcasted live on Live.ly are not recorded to the phone.
Arlington Heights area moms have been wary about the musical.ly app because recordings often reveal areas of people’s homes, such as a girl’s bathroom or bedroom. If video settings are set to public, any stranger can review the girls’ videos.
live.ly and music.ly are published by musical.ly.
The first version of musical.ly was officially launched in August 2014, founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. After failing as a general education app, the company targeted the US teenage market with the musical.ly platform incorporates music and video in a social network.
At VidCon, July 24, 2016, musical.ly officially launched live.ly, as a new live video streaming platform. With little marketing, live.ly rose to the number one position in the iOS App Store within 3 days. On March 31, 2017 at 6:30 a.m., the musical.ly app ranked 86 on the app store. On March 24, 2017 Live.ly ranked #10 among social apps, and #107 overall.
As of July 2016, musical.ly had over 90 million registered users and an average of 12 million new videos posted every day, according to a Billboard magazine article by Dan Rys.
The video social network app and live broadcasting company, musical.ly, is headquartered in Shanghai, China and has offices in San Francisco, California.
Humberside Police covers a jurisdiction in northeast UK about 160 miles north of London, covering the East Riding of Yorkshire, the city of Kingston upon Hull, North East Lincolnshire and North Lincolnshire. Kingston upon Hull (abbreviated Hull) is a city on the River Hull, 25 miles inland from the North Sea and with a population of 259,000.
See also …
Hull Daily Mail Hull mum’s horror after paedophile exposes himself to daughter, 8, on Live.ly app
AppAnie.com (App ranking)
Stay informed with news from The Cardinal’s Emergencies Behind the Scenes Facebook page — Facebook.com/CardinalEmergencies. Includes links to favorite public safety and emergency rescuers and product manufacturers and safety companies that have facebook pages. Submit your pictures or just stay up-to-date on with fire, rescue, EMS and police photo galleries. Please add your public safety photo to the wall album — go direct to the Arlington Cardinal Emergencies Behind the Scenes photos. For a list of all of The Cardinal Facebook fan pages, go to Arlingtoncardinal.com/about/facebook …
Help fund The Cardinal Arlingtoncardinal.com/sponsor