A news story came out of the UK yesterday that members of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center are requesting that Facebook implement a “panic button”. The button will serve as a direct email link to law enforcement where children can report cyber-bullying, sexual abuse, or any other threat or suspicious activity. The news story goes on to describe a case where an adult male created a Facebook profile portraying himself as a teenage male. After connecting with people, he developed an online relationship with a 17 year- old girl. The pair exchanged cell phone numbers and agreed to meet on a date, where the man raped and murdered the girl before dumping her body in a field. Read the full article here.
We worked a case where the daughter of a wealthy businessman went missing. The child was gone for two days when the parents contacted a private investigator (they didn’t contact law enforcement because of the possible exposure to the family). We were hired by the private investigator to perform a forensic examination on the child’s computer to try to determine what could have happened to her. After a thorough review of her computer, we found that through the social networking site Myspace.com, the daughter recently started exchanging emails with what appeared to be an older male. We were able to recover several emails that talked about setting a date and time to meet up and hang out. Shortly thereafter we found the email that gave details about the date and time they would meet up, as well as the name of the hotel where they were staying. We provided this information to the private investigator, who successfully brought the daughter back to her parents unharmed. In this case, the daughter willingly ran away from home to spend time with this older male.
The internet can be our best friend, but it can also be our worst enemy. With the increase in social networking sites, chat/video sites, and other sites tailored to the younger generation, the story above is becoming all too common. There are people out there joining these sites with the intent to develop relationships with naive teenagers in order to harm them physically or sexually.
We urge parents to keep a watchful eye on their child’s internet activity. The first step that can be taken is to make sure that the computer is located in an open room such as a kitchen, living room, dining room where parents can see what activity is occurring on a computer monitor. Another step for parents would be to set up parental controls on the computer and block websites that are not suitable for the child’s age. The one step we highly recommend is setting up an internet monitoring program on the child’s computer. Though this sounds like a sales pitch, Internet Monitoring is one of the services we provide. This service is both reactive and proactive. We can perform a mini forensic examination on the child’s computer to see recent internet activity, sent/received emails, chat participation, in, and recently viewed images/videos. Then we install and configure the monitoring software on the child’s computer which allows parents to see detailed updates of everything the child does on their computer. Though most parents feel it is betraying their kid’s trust, statistics and news articles don’t lie. It is better to be safe than sorry.
If you have any questions about internet safety and monitoring or want us to speak to your organization about this subject, contact us at info@precisioninvestigations.net.
