Detective shows sexual advances on Net are widespread
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“What’s up, sweetie?” he writes seconds after she enters a chat room called “daddy’s lil girls.”
“Jsut surfin,” Heather responds, misspelling the words to reflect the typing skills of a girl her age.
“For anything special?” he wants to know.
She hesitates.
“Are you alone?” he presses. “Is there anyone in the room with you sweetie?”
That was where Tom Evans, a middle-aged man, and an investigator for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, posing as Heather, had to chuckle a little bit.
“It goes on from here,” Evans told a group of astonished people attending Thursday’s live Internet chat room demonstration, all of whom were watching what was happening when Evans went undercover to show just how easy it is for child sexual predators to gain access to, and manipulate, unsuspecting children.
Evans, who has been involved in 900 child exploitation cases since he began working with the federally funded program in 2000, said when he poses as children – either boy or girl – the solicitations never fail to occur, and proved it in seconds Thursday.
Heather was bombarded with not only messages from teacherjeff, but by several other instant messages and most of them were loaded with sexual innuendo.
Although not all of those communications will turn into actual criminal cases, the task force, with just four such investigators state wide, seeks to create solid cases based on crimes ranging from possession of child pornography and sexual exploitation of a minor, to aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor.
Evans and Pam Beck of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, who presented information about Tennessee’s sex offender registry and related laws, came to McMinnville to educate citizens on technical aspects of the laws and to make them aware of what is on the World Wide Web that is so scary.
Evans said kids are “whizzes” at the computer and can create e-mail accounts from any messenger service. Often, children will include personal information in their “profiles,” as demonstrated when he typed in a search for “Farragut Middle School” and got four hits.
Clicking on one, he was able to learn details of an actual student in that city in Tennessee. If he wanted, he could have sent her e-mail, chatted or maybe even visited her Web site, although she did not have a photograph posted.
Many children don’t realize how easy it is, in the digital age, for people to find them or how many of those people are closet criminals, he said.
“You see these people and you don’t think it’s going to be a bad guy,” Evans said, referring to a former Marine with the rank of staff sergeant who got busted when he traveled to Tennessee from North Carolina to meet what he thought was a young girl in a hotel room.
And Evans had other horror stories, like the teacher from Poplar Grove who pled guilty to three counts of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor and who later allegedly tried to buy two children for $200, or the grandfather who placed sexual images of his 1 1/2-year old granddaughter on the Internet.
Evans noted law enforcement can never catch all of the criminal activity, but suggested a simple approach for parents wanting to combat such problems. He said parents should make it their business to know their children’s online activities and keep computers in heavy traffic areas of the house.
Parents can also check messenger sites and e-mail lists, and if they don’t know the people listed, they should not allow their children to talk to them. Learning chat room lingo – POS means parent over shoulder – and in certain circumstances, installing keystroke logging software, were other ideas.
“I’d just advocate being a real nosy parent,” he added.
McMinnville Police Department Capt. Bryan Denton, who presides over the Noon Exchange Club that co-sponsored Thursday’s event, said he was surprised and troubled by what he heard.
“We’ve experienced problems like this locally, but even me, after I saw what this guy put on, I felt that even I was kind of naive,” Denton said after the presentation. “So I think if I am, then that’s probably generally the case in our area.”