Maybe, maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us. – William Goldberg

It’s easy to let your beast out when nobody’s watching, when you’ve put up an online persona that nobody can trace. Or maybe it’s just been you the whole time, and every day, for the real world, you were putting up a show. 

That’s exactly what happened with iMilki. Of course, that’s not his real name; it was his avatar. See, iMilki was a VTuber, an entertainer who built a virtual character and performed on social platforms. His real name was Josel Rodriguez. 

Josel, a 22-year-old from Brooklyn, was a gamer who had created his first Minecraft account in 2015.

But, unlike most Minecraft players, gaming was not the only thing on Josel’s mind. See, Minecraft players can interact online with other players. This added feature was intended to be a fun way for players to enhance their gaming experience.

In 2016, Josel, going by the name iMilki, had started interacting with a girl who was only thirteen at the time. They first met while interacting through Minecraft, but soon, Josel had convinced her to give him her Skype account details. 

Eventually, as days passed, the two of them started spending a lot of time talking on Skype. The thirteen-year-old was unaware of the predator lurking behind his online persona. She had started to trust him and his words. 

That’s when the inexplicable started to happen. He started asking her to perform derogatory and sexual acts online. Unbeknownst to her, he was recording everything. Everything. Her innocence had been taken away. 

When his teenage girl had started playing online games, her father hadn’t been worried. Why would he be? She was just playing a game, as most American kids do. As he did when he was a kid. 

As days went by, he started noticing that she wasn’t herself. She was occupied and often dazed. Suspecting some foul activity was going on in his house, the girl’s father decided to snoop around her laptop and tablet. 

Much to his horror, he found the interaction between iMilki and his girl. It was heartbreaking. 

He immediately notified the law enforcement, who took swift action. They traced the teen’s phone records and obtained a court order to find the owner on the other end of the line.

After obtaining a search warrant to search through Josel Rodriguez’s belongings, they were able to uncover the truth behind this 23-year-old’s online persona. 

The police were horrified as they went through his laptop. There were more than a hundred videos and photos of underage girls in his hard drive; most of them were child pornography. 

Josel Rodriguez was immediately apprehended by law enforcement and held at Rikers with a bail amount of $30,000. 

This incident serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of children online.

It is also disturbing to think that people can behave this way when they’ve hidden behind an online personality. It’s as if the rules don’t matter to you anymore, but they do.