Emerging Technologies Blog

Now that's a good way to catch child sex abusers. You shouldn't ponder on where to catch these criminals, just  use a computer-generated sweetie and they will come like sharks---10,100, every hour.


A children's rights group in the Netherlands managed to identify over 1,000 pedophiles worldwide with the help of a 10-year-old computer-generated girl they called "Sweetie."Activists from Terre des Hommes performed an Internet sting operation from a warehouse office in an Amsterdam industrial park, according to the Associated Press.


 A rise in online child sex tourism led the group's director of projects, Has Guyt, to conduct the probe, which produced shocking results.

"If we don't intervene soon, this sinister phenomenon will totally run out of control," Guyt told AP. 

Using a 3D digital display, members of TDH constructed Sweetie - a female meant to resemble a Filipina child - and put her into online chat rooms. Over the next 10 weeks, 20,000 predators approached Sweetie, asking her to perform sexual acts on video.

 "They were ready to pay Sweetie for sexual acts in front of her webcam," head of the group Albert Jaap van Santbrink told reporters at The Hague.

 "All we had to do was enter a chat room, post the details of a prepubescent girl, and within 30 seconds, we had ten people wanting to talk to us," one researcher who went by Peter, said. "After five minutes, we had 100.

These people have zero-risk perception. They feel the Internet is a lawless place." While the pedophiles chatted with Sweetie, researchers used basic research techniques to find information about them. They've since turned the material over to Interpol.

Terre des Hommes said that they did not approach anyone on the internet but instead waited for people to approach Sweetie and ask for sex acts.

In one exchange, a man named "Older4young", identified as a 35-year-old father of two from Atlanta in the United States, asks Sweetie to undress for $10.
           
One Australian groomer has  also pleaded guilty to sending sexually explicit pictures of himself to the fake-10-year old known to them as ''sweetie'' and has been sentenced to two years in person.

BBC Reporter Angus Crawford paid a visit to charity organization room and saw how they logged on to a chat room as ''Sweetie.'' He said, I quote '' within seconds, like sharks, men were cycling''. 

However, the European Union policing agency Europol expressed reservations about Terre des Hommes's approach."We believe that criminal investigations using intrusive surveillance measures should be the exclusive responsibility of law enforcement agencies," Europol spokesman Soren Pedersen said.