US law enforcement officers say Meta and Snapchat routinely delay or reject warrants. The companies disagree
Max Osterman was 18 when he connected with a drug dealer on Snapchat who used the handle skyhigh.303. Max would message him whenever he wanted to buy Percocet, and they would meet. After about a year, and just days after their last exchange, Max collapsed. The pills he ordered had been laced with fentanyl. He died from the overdose in February 2021 at his home in Broomfield, Colorado.
The dealer continued selling prescription painkillers until 2023, when he was jailed on two drug distribution convictions. When handing down the sentence, the judge said he was responsible for four deaths, yet he never faced charges for supplying the pills that killed Max.
“Snapchat never gave this critical evidence, never took action, never stopped the dealer who had been selling drugs on their platform for years before Max’s death and even after,” said Kim Osterman, his mother. “It took three separate requests from law enforcement for Snapchat to even respond, and when they did, they claimed there was no information.”
A police report reviewed by the Guardian shows a delay in obtaining data from the dealer’s Snapchat account, which investigators said they needed to definitively link him to Max’s death. The report also states that Snapchat did not provide law enforcement with any content from Max’s account apart from his user information. When Colorado detectives first sent Snap Inc, the app’s parent company, a production of records request for account information on skyhigh.3o3, it took more than two months to receive a reply. When the response did arrive, Snap said it would not comply, citing a grammar technicality in the order. The inclusion of a “/,” the company argued, made the request “ambiguous”, according to a field case report from the Broomfield police department. The company eventually sent detectives information on the drug dealer’s account, skyhigh.303, in response to several separate warrants law enforcement filed in the year after Max’s death. No content from Max’s Snapchat account was ever provided to law enforcement, the police report states.
The Guardian has reviewed four cases where Snap Inc and Meta have delayed or declined to comply with warrants and subpoenas requesting information related to serious crimes linked to their platforms. Eight law enforcement officers interviewed have said multiple cases reviewed by the Guardian are emblematic of a wider problem they face with the companies, which often delay or decline to comply with warrants and subpoenas requesting information related to serious crimes on their platforms. According to court records, police reports and interviews with law enforcement officials, these refusals and lags can derail investigations into crimes ranging from fentanyl deaths to child sexual exploitation.
Read the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/19/meta-snapchat-tech-giant-child-abuse-drug-cases
Katie McQue 