"He told her his name was Brandon. He was a 20-year-old musician from Texas who played guitar and understood her soul. For 18 months, she fell in love with him online. The night she finally went to meet him, she never came home—because Brandon Kane never existed." 
In February 2007, 15-year-old Australian teenager Carly Ryan from Stirling, South Australia, became the first person in the country to be murdered by an online predator she met through social media [citation:1]. For over a year, she had been groomed by 50-year-old Garry Francis Newman, a serial paedophile who created a fake persona named "Brandon Kane" to manipulate her on platforms like MySpace [citation:1][citation:2]. Newman traveled from Melbourne using a second fake identity as Brandon's "father, Shane," even attending Carly's 15th birthday party and staying overnight at her home [citation:1]. When Carly rejected his sexual advances, Newman lured her to a final meeting at Horseshoe Bay in Port Elliot, where he brutally bashed her, suffocated her by pushing her face into the sand, and threw her unconscious body into the water to drown [citation:1][citation:5]. Carly's body was found floating face-down in the shallows the next morning [citation:1]. Newman, who maintained over 200 fake online personas and was caught at his computer still posing as Brandon to groom a 14-year-old girl in Western Australia, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a 29-year non-parole period [citation:1][citation:9]. Her mother, Sonya Ryan, turned tragedy into advocacy, founding the Carly Ryan Foundation and tirelessly campaigning for "Carly's Law"—Australian legislation criminalizing adults who lie about their age to minors online [citation:3][citation:6]. This is the heartbreaking story that changed internet safety laws forever.


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