"Thanks for participating in our live demo for the New York State Cybersecurity Conference" "huh? what do you mean?" "I mean, our chat was displayed on a big screen in front of 300 in a conference in Albany, NY" "bye"
That was the end of just one of three live, simultaneous chat windows operated by an FBI agent and a police officer at yesterday's NYS Cybersecurity Awareness Conference. The FBI agent was showing us how incredibly fast it would be for a child to be approached by an online predator if they wandered into the wrong public chat room. In this case, they were using AOL chat rooms for the demonstration, but it would have been just as awful and shocking on any of the commonly used free chat services we all use. They had selected a chat room in the user-generated chats, not an AOL sponsored chat. And they'd selected one that, just by the name, seemed more salacious than the others, with a title indicating the participants liked "older men."
After showing us the special fake AOL and MySpace profiles he was using, which presented him as a 14 year old girl named Mikaela, the agent entered the chat room. He told us that typically the pedophiles will look up the AOL person's profile and any linked social networking profiles to determine if the person is a likely target. Within no more than 5 minutes, three people sent "Mikaela" a private instant message. And within just a sentence or two, it was clear they were adult men looking for a minor female child to meet. One man described himself as 55 years of age, married 25 years. The second man sent a photo which presented himself as late 20's and fairly "normal" looking, even handsome. Each of the three quickly asked Mikaela for a photo, which she declined to send, saying, "my mom won't let me make pics". Two of our perverts then sent pictures of themselves, one quite graphic.
Those of us in the audience had the mixed reactions you might expect from a group of parents, law enforcement and educators watching the live demo up on a large auditorium screen. Each new suggestive remark typed by the pedophiles was met by a shrug from our law enforcement people and with gasps and "ewwww"s from the rest of us. When the burly cop working the keyboard would type responses in the "voice" of our 14 year old, we would even occasionally giggle, which gave us a bit of release from the shock of what we were seeing.
The FBI agent told us he has more live investigations than he can manage. Despite the disgusting nature of the images this "child" was receiving, the agent wasn't going to capture the demo to persue getting any of these men. Instead they look for repeat offenders, repetitive efforts to contact a child and they focus on criminals within their geographic jurisdiction.
I have to admit, I don't know any 14 year old girls who would admit to visiting any chat rooms and certainly not one intended for an adult audience such as this one. Still, it was a disturbing view of a world I knew existed but prefer not to know too much about. Sort of like knowing there is a sewer system but not wanting to go down under the streets to look at it. Too bad, there isn't a sewage treatment plant we could just flush these creeps in to.