So they can create a better version of themselves on the Internet?
– Yes, for example thanks to an avatar, a digital character. Do you know why it is so incredibly attractive to young people? If other Internet users start to pressure you, all you have to do is create a new one, perhaps stronger. And in reality this is not possible.
But despite this great advantage, dangers still lurk in the virtual world. One of them is pedophiles. Young people downplay this threat. They are confident that they can recognize them. And then a big surprise, because there are a lot of pedophiles in their favorite games – Minecraft or Counter-Strike. Mostly men. These are no longer the same men who hide behind bushes on the playground and grab children to get free sweets. Now we can meet them mainly on the Internet. They are on almost every corner. Mostly in games. They can approach a young person in such a way that he will not notice anything. Their method? Pretending to be peers. Mostly girls. They deliberately add age to the nickname, becoming Ania12 or Kasia14. Then they look for teenagers in the game to chat with. It is about creating new maps in the game and developing characters. The process of casting such nets is quite long and subtle. But, believe me, it is effective.
What happens next?
– The data of captured teenagers is sent to the darknet, that is, the dark side of the Internet. It is a hidden network. To access it, you must configure your browser accordingly. Pedophiles have their forums there. They include, among others: emails of caught minors, photos of their game avatars or social network profiles.
I used to play around too. I formed teams with other people. We told each other where we lived. We exchanged phone numbers. Only now do I understand how dangerous it is.
– Young people often don’t have this reflection. Every year we meet them in educational institutions as part of Safer Internet Day. We warn them and they keep on giving their warnings. They probably think: “What are some old police officers going to be bothering us with?” The problem is that teenagers behave like old people online. They are just as fond of clicking on fake links. Especially those from auction sites.
Maybe that’s why they don’t see anything wrong when the pedophile they’ve been playing with asks them for photos. First of their face, then from the waist up, and finally of their entire body, preferably naked. Just to make things clear – this is also done by young people from good families who don’t have any educational problems. Some of them go a step further. Even if they suspect that they are writing to a pedophile, they still send photos of themselves.
For what?
– Earnings, sir. For a nude photo, they get as much as for a week’s worth of strawberries. They used to talk about gallery owners, that is, girls looking for sponsors in shopping malls. Today they have migrated to the Internet. Teenagers selling their bodies there is an increasingly common practice. Boys also participate. And pedophiles only benefit from this. They willingly pay for nude photos or webcam shows.
As police officers, our hands are often tied here. The crime of pedophilia occurs when the minor is under fifteen years old. However, the pedophile must know the age of the victim. Unfortunately, young people often hide or lie about it. Sometimes it is enough for a thirteen-year-old girl to put on makeup to look like a sixteen-year-old. Of course, then we analyze her photos to estimate how old she really is. They are also checked by an expert anthropologist. But sometimes even that does not help.
Do young people know that their nude photos won’t disappear from the Internet?
– They don’t care. They don’t care what happens to their photos. But only up to a point. And that happens when the recipient of the nude photo starts blackmailing them. They threaten to send it to their school, to their parents, or share it on Facebook under the name of the person who took the photo. In exchange for their silence, they want what all pedophiles want: a real encounter and sexual intercourse.
Do teenagers make up?
– Unfortunately, yes. Some of them even set themselves the goal of having sex with an adult. We once had a case of a girl at the police station who knowingly played a daughter-father role with a pedophile. Can you imagine how difficult it was for us to tell the desperate parents the truth?
There is another problem with photos. Many teenagers, but also adults, post photos of their apartments online. One with the dog, the second in the bedroom, the third with the parents in the living room. Burglars examine them and see if there is any expensive electronic equipment, old furniture or paintings in the background. If so, they start following the profile of that teenager. They use a publicly available program to extract data from their photos. So they know what they were taken of and when. But what is worse: they also know where. Because even if we have the location coordinates turned off, they will still be activated for a second when the shutter button is pressed. Thanks to this information, the burglar knows the home address of the person taking the photo. If they add more, for example on holidays, the burglars get a signal that the house is empty. And the problem is ready.
What are the other secrets of young people on the Internet?
– Their purchases. In the games, they learn that there is something called the darknet. That they will find everything there. From medicines, drugs to weapons. Access to this world is facilitated by manuals available online in PDF format. Thanks to them, they know, among other things: buy drugs step by step and leave no trace. The simple fact of entering the darknet guarantees them a good deal of anonymity. But they still read in textbooks how to increase it. They pay for their transactions with a specific virtual currency. Delivery? Well, these are no longer the days when you had to find a dealer in a dark parking lot. Today, drugs arrive in a parcel locker or by mail.
The Internet hides another secret of teenagers – hate. No other age group writes as much crap about itself as young people. I have the impression that some young people are excited and enthusiastic about this. They love to browse unretouched photos of bloody crime scenes on the dark web. And then they write: “Wow, that’s great! I would cut off my leg.” It’s hard for me to say what the psychological motivations behind these teenagers are.
Aren’t they afraid of falling? After all, hatred is punishable.
– They think that the darknet provides complete anonymity. So, they set up the browser first. Then they create a fake Facebook account and pretend to be an adult, posting random photos they found online on their profiles. And in the end they write the worst things about themselves. I have met teenagers like this more than once. At first, their accounts seemed to me like an army of haters paid by someone. However, after analysis, it turned out that a minor was behind it all. Why was he doing this? For satisfaction. He felt better by humiliating others. Maybe because he could not cope with the situation in real life. Because excluded teenagers are most often responsible for the hate.
How can we counteract this?
– It is impossible to fully supervise young people on the Internet. But if we are their parents and we see something disturbing, it is better to abandon the idea of pulling the network cable out of the computer. This will only make things worse. Young people will rebel or start doing bad things in spite of us. I know of cases where teenagers responded to such punishments with threats of suicide. Some of them even tried to commit suicide.
Therefore, I would recommend soft prevention. For example, in the form of free programs that monitor the activities of users of a certain network. Thanks to them, we will know which sites our child visits. But also with whom they communicate. However, these programs operate within a specific network, in this case – our home Wi-Fi. If a teenager uses LTE on his cell phone at home, we will not see anything.
Another way is keylogger software. It works in the background, does not obstruct the equipment and detects the keys we press on the keyboard. The advantage is that it works remotely and on any network. Even when a teenager is at school, we can see what he or she is typing on the phone or laptop.
But this is tracking and violating your privacy.
– That’s why I’m not entirely in favor of such solutions. However, my experience shows that sometimes there is no other way to ensure that a young person is not going down the wrong path online. We don’t need to track them 24/7. Maybe sometimes it’s enough to observe their online movements for a week? Or at least once in a while?
Wouldn’t it be better to talk?
– The conversation is good, of course. But some of them end differently. Some teenagers consider themselves gods on the Internet. They believe that their parents have no idea about the dangers of the Internet. That’s why they listen to them, but let them go out the other ear.
But I assure you that what they know is just the tip of the iceberg. Their knowledge is limited to clicking on the Facebook icon, writing a comment and giving a like. It is not enough to be safe or anonymous. Tracking down a person who uses the darknet is, of course, not easy for the police. But it is not impossible either. That is why I am warning you: sooner or later we will be able to determine the identity of the person who breaks the law on the Internet.
Adam — officer of the Provincial Police Headquarters in Poznań. He works in the cybercrime combating department. Due to the nature of his work, his name and image cannot be made public.
