Nix 🐦‍🔥

A 15-year-old girl spent more than 500 days held in a basement in Oregon, and the thing that finally got her out was a phone her captor handed her himself. He made sure it had no cell service, figuring a Wi-Fi-only phone could never get her rescued. One of the games on it was Among Us. Her mom had found her jacket in the driveway back in Garden City, Utah, and her phone shut off. According to the federal complaint, Adam Hunter Harmel, 39, met her on social media, offered her money to come to Oregon, and drove to Perry, Utah to pick her up in May 2025. At some point she came to believe the police had stopped looking for her. In mid-October she got to talking with another kid while playing Among Us. They switched over to a different app, and she told them her real name and that a man was holding her against her will. That's the moment this could have gone sideways so easily. A kid gets a strange message from a stranger online, and it would be completely normal to assume it's a prank. This kid told their parent anyway, and the parent took it seriously enough to call the FBI. On November 1, agents watched a video call set up through that parent. She walked them through what she'd been going through and showed them the knife she said he kept. Oregon State Police and federal agents got to the house that same day, and Harmel was arrested at a traffic stop in Ontario, Oregon. I was a producer on Fortnite, and from the inside, a multiplayer game is basically a giant chat app that happens to have a game in it. Lobbies, party chat, friend lists, people from every time zone. He thought he'd cut her off from the world and left her a door to strangers all over it. And the game she was playing makes this hard to read without getting chills. Among Us is about one thing. Someone on the ship is pretending to be someone they're not, and everybody else has to notice and hit the emergency button before it's too late. Millions of kids have practiced that on a cartoon spaceship, and one of them ended up doing it for real. She got home because two people believed her, a kid she'd never met and that kid's mom or dad. If either one had brushed it off, she could still be in that basement.