Starting a new school year can be an exciting time for children as they look to make new friends, but federal investigators warn parents that the desire to fit in can make kids a prime target for online predators.
Robert Hammer, who is the Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations for the Pacific Northwest, said it has nothing to do with a child’s intelligence or personal character, and everything to do with criminals who have experience in gaining and exploiting kids’ trust.
“Every child is at risk: boy, girl, parents, no parents, rich, poor, it doesn’t matter,” Hammer said. “The predators are out there, they’re trolling and they’re looking for any opportunity to get to these kids’ networks.”
Hammer said kids are particularly vulnerable when they’re entering a new school year or a new school entirely. He said they need to feel included or popular, so they add as many friends as possible to social media or online gaming platforms.
Those same kids are unlikely to verify whether they’re adding real children or teens to their social networks. Hammer said predators know that and will take advantage of it, setting up their profile to look like another teenager.
“You may think it’s Timmy from next door, but it’s actually a guy in Oklahoma in his parents’ basement,” Hammer said. “It’s those kinds of dangers and those simple slip-ups that allow these predators to get into our kids’ social networks.”
Once they’re in, Hammer said online predators won’t come out and immediately request an explicit picture or to meet up, but will systematically groom the child to trust them and believe they would never do anything to hurt them.
Hammer said they’ll pick apart kids’ profiles, noting their likes, dislikes, activities, sports, special interests, friends and families, and use that information to relate to them and gain their trust, often over a period of weeks or months.
According to Hammer, the bulk of the cases federal investigators deal with in Washington state start with this type of grooming and often end with child exploitation, child pornography and sextortion.
“We see a lot of folks, again, hook these kids into situations that they simply cannot get out of,” Hammer said. “They get one compromising image of the child and then they use that one image to blackmail them into getting an infinite number more images, videos.”
Hammer said they will continue to hold those images over the child’s head and threaten them with exposure if they don’t comply with their demands, including sending more explicit photos or meeting up in person and potentially coercing them to engage in sex acts.
With access to the child’s personal information, predators are even able to include specific organizations or people they’ll be sending the images to in order to make sure the kids believe their threats.
“‘I’m going to email Stephanie, Sally, Michelle on your volleyball team and show them these images if you don’t give me more images,’” Hammer said. “And because they are able to individualize the threats and the…
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