What Happened to Kik? The Once Popular App Had a Serious Issue with Child Exploitation

In the frontier days of the internet, it was a no-holds-barred Wild West-esque landscape where rules were few and dangers were many. Young Millennials and elder Gen Z found themselves cavorting online with peers, enemies, and predators with equal abandon.

When the messenger app Kik launched in 2010, it hit the ground running and drew in people from all walks of life.

For nine years, the messenger app weathered controversies and problems as people grew to either love or hate it. So what happened to Kik in the end? It shut down in 2019 after a number of issues, and here's what we know about why it was ultimately shuttered.

In September 2019, the CEO of Kik announced that the app would be shutting down. When the CEO, Ted Livingston, announced the app's closure, he made no mention to issues of child exploitation and concerns over security for the app's youngest users, simply referring to an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into the app's cryptocurrency, Kin (per CBS News).

The CEO seemed to tout the messenger app's closure as part of a broader strategy to focus the company's efforts on Kin.

However, it wasn't the cryptocurrency that garnered the most concern about Kik's function during the nine years that it operated, raising many questions about Livingston's comments on plans to shutter the platform.

While ostensibly the reason given for shuttering Kik was to focus on Kin, not everyone believes Livingston... And there's a pretty good reason for that.

In 2016, 13-year-old Nicole Lovell was murdered by a man she met on the app, according to 48 Hours. The BBC also reported that over 1,000 child abuse cases were linked to Kik.

In 2025, Kik resurfaced again after a man was arrested in West Palm Beach, Fla. CBS-12 Palm Beach reports that in June 2025, 25-year-old Diego Vasconsellos was arrested after the sheriff's office received a cyber tip about the man's online activities.

According to the outlet, the tip led them to subpoena Vasconsellos's Kik account, and there they discovered over 200 files related to child sexual abuse material and exploitation.

While Kik may no longer be up and running, the safe haven it seems to have provided predators and the content it disseminated will forever be linked to the app in the public memory.

Those who used Kik in its heyday may have some fond memories of chatting with friends, completing challenges, and the thrill of meeting strangers, but the rise and fall of Kik taught people that you can't always trust an online platform to police itself adequately.

And as parents began to learn their responsibilities in an increasingly internet-connected world, the fear of new Kiks has prompted attention to stricter laws about social media usage for young kids.

In Florida, for instance, a 2025 law prohibited children under 14 from having social media accounts (via CNN).

But even though Kik is no longer around, the threat of child exploitation online, and therefore the need to respond to it as a society, remains.