SHERLISSA PETERS, DAILY MAIL and SAPA-AFP
Durban - Three South Africans are among the 1 000 paedophiles a children’s rights group says they have netted by using a virtual child as bait.
The three had been reported to Interpol with the others, which included 46 Australians, Jochem Rotteveel, a spokesman for the organisation Terre des Hommes Netherlands, said on Tuesday.
They were among tens of thousands of men worldwide who contacted the virtual girl in online video chat rooms.
Many of the online sexual predators were from the US, the UK and India.
Terre de Hommes, a Dutch children’s charity, developed a computer model of a 10-year-old Filipina girl called “Sweetie” to expose what they believe is a new culture of online child abuse.
Sweetie’s image was placed in internet chat rooms from a remote building in Amsterdam where it was used to lure unsuspecting paedo-philes into having conversations with her.
Pretending to be the 10-year-old Filipina, members of the organisation logged in to chat rooms where she was approached by men who at first befriended her, before making explicit sexual demands.
In a 10-week period, more than 20 000 predators approached Sweetie, asking for webcam sex performances.
While they were chatting with the “girl”, researchers gathered information about her customers through social media.
Using this data, researchers identified the abusers and passed the information on to police.
Of the 1 000 men who were willing to pay to watch her take off her clothes, 254 were from the US, 110 from Britain and 103 from India.
According to Terre des Hommes, children in developing countries were frequently being approached by adult foreign men for online sex.
The children are located via social media websites and chat rooms, and the men then use untraceable credit cards to pay and online aliases to make contact.
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Although national and international laws ban online child sex tourism, Terre des Hommes claims only six perpetrators worldwide have been convicted of this crime.
The Sweetie project identified more than 1 000 paedophiles in less than three months, from May to July. It has since passed the names of every paedophile to police in 71 countries.
Hans Guyt, who led the project, said tens of thousands of children worldwide may be victims in similar appalling cases.
He said: “The predator won’t come forward. The victim won’t come forward. This requires a new way of policing.
“We identified ourselves as 10-year-old Filipina girls. We did not solicit anything unless it was offered to us.”
Rotteveel said that during the research period, Sweetie was bombarded with more than 100 000 requests, of which they could only respond to 1 000, owing to limited resources.
All of their online conversations were recorded so they could be used as evidence in any criminal prosecutions. One man who posed as Sweetie said:
“It’s terrifying, it’s really scary. It breaks your stereotypical image of a predator.
“Before, I thought they were all 45-year-old males with long coats. Now it is clear they are younger guys with proper jobs and families.”
Terre des Hommes, which is campaigning to stop webcam sex tourism, said it would make the technology behind the sting available to police.
The group handed its “dossiers” to Interpol on Monday.
According to the UN and the FBI, there were more than 750 000 child predators online at any given moment, Terre des Hommes said, while also announcing an online petition to pressure governments to adopt proactive investigation policies.
“With greater resources, it would have been easy to identify 10 000 people,” Guyt said.
Daily News