OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. \u2013 An Oakland County man is facing federal charges for allegedly cyberstalking a woman and sending her AI-generated nude images of her.<\/p>\n
Josh Stilman, 36, is accused of messaging a social media influencer on Instagram, sending AI-generated nude images of her and threatening to post them online if she did not respond to his messages.<\/p>\n
Woman reports to FBI of Instagram messages<\/p>\n
Court documents were released on Sept. 16, 2025, detailing the events leading to Stilman\u2019s arrest.<\/p>\n
The investigation began in March 2025 when the FBI office in Portland received information that a woman had been getting direct messages on Instagram with the username \u201cFriendBlender\u201d that had artificial intelligence (AI) generated nude images of her and other unknown women.<\/p>\n
\u2018I have much more than you\u2019ve seen\u2019<\/p>\n
The woman who reported to the FBI is a social media influencer with nearly 100,000 followers on Instagram at the time, so she generally does not respond to messages.<\/p>\n
On one occasion, however, she replied to FriendBlender along the lines of \u201cyou made me look better than I actually do,\u201d in what she believed was an attempt to disregard the account.<\/p>\n
Court document stated the messages stopped for a while, but they picked back up several months later and became more vulgar. FriendBlender allegedly messages the woman, threatening to release the AI-generated pornographic photos of her to the public if she did not reply.<\/p>\n
Court documents revealed what the account FriendBlender messaged the woman:<\/p>\n
FriendBlender: \u201cCan you play along though?\u201d<\/p>\n
FriendBlender: \u201cEasiest way to get rid of me lol\u201d<\/p>\n
FriendBlender then shares an AI image via Google Album link<\/p>\n
FriendBlender: \u201cYou weren\u2019t responding. . . \ud83d\ude15\u201d<\/p>\n
FriendBlender: \u201cI wish you\u2019d respond to some of my questions. I really don\u2019t want to resort to posting things online. I have much more than you\u2019ve seen. I\u2019m really not trying to offend you either. I j*** off to you every day, I just want to know what you like. I\u2019m not going to expect you to talk to me everyday or even that often. But I want to know some naughty things about you.\u201d<\/p>\n
FBI agents said the Google Album link contained what the woman described as more AI-generated nude photos of her. The woman found that the display name associated with the Google Album link was Josh Stilman.<\/p>\n
She told authorities she researched her own Instagram account for followers and noticed there was a Josh Stilman that followed her account that used the Instagram account called \u201cThisDIYguy.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said she noticed Stilman had previously messaged her using the ThisDIYguy account back in 2021.<\/p>\n
She also told officials that she had googled the name Josh Stilman and found other social media accounts belonging to him.<\/p>\n
In March 2025, she messaged Stilman and asked him, \u201cDoes your wife know you are messaging me?\u201d The FBI said this immediately prompted the FriendBlender and ThisDIYGuy accounts to block the woman\u2019s account.<\/p>\n
According to the woman, Stilman also deleted the Google Album he previously sent to her and took down his LinkedIn page around the same time.<\/p>\n
Officials said she took screenshots and video-recorded the messages she received from FriendBlender before she was blocked from the account. She gave the images and video recording to the FBI.<\/p>\n
The woman said she contacted additional women through social media who claimed to have knowledge of other women being similarly threatened by Stilman dating back to 2019 or 2020. She noted the threats made against the other women were similar to what she received from the FriendBlender account.<\/p>\n
According to authorities, the woman said she had to make several lifestyle changes in response to Stilman\u2019s alleged threats, including removing her address from her public website, worrying about her family\u2019s safety and carrying a weapon with her.<\/p>\n
How FBI found Stilman<\/p>\n
The FBI in Portland found a possible match for Stilman, with multiple addresses in Metro Detroit. Officials also compared Stilman\u2019s driver\u2019s license photo with his Instagram profile picture and appeared to be the same person.<\/p>\n
According to court documents, local police database checks showed several police contacts, including a bench warrant on a traffic offense in Romulus and a mental health check call to the Livonia Police Department in April 2024. Among the addresses associated with Stilman, a home address in Commerce Township appeared to be the most recent.<\/p>\n
FBI surveillance confirmed Stilman lived at his home in Commerce Township.<\/p>\n
FBI agents also obtained a search warrant for Stilman\u2019s Instagram accounts and confirmed he is the subscriber of both FriendBlender and ThisDIYGuy accounts.<\/p>\n
During the search, additional messages were found in the account that were sent to the woman who reported to authorities. Multiple vulgar messages and AI-generated images of her were found in the chat beginning March 4, 2025.<\/p>\n
FBI agents obtained and executed a search warrant for Stilman\u2019s Google Drive account and found that his web history contained searches and visits to websites that were used to create AI-generated pornography.<\/p>\n
Stilman faces federal charges of interstate communications of a threat to extort and cyberstalking.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 by WDIV ClickOnDetroit – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. \u2013 An Oakland County man is facing federal charges for allegedly cyberstalking a woman and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,105882,105881,1303,22184,74],"class_list":["post-178208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chronicled","tag-commerce-township","tag-michigan","tag-oakland-county","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}