Tracking Pedophiles
A lot of us older folk remember riding our bicycles or skateboards to the park or the playground to socialize with our friends. We’d meet around 3:00pm and we all knew that when the streetlights came on, it was time to head home. We didn’t have a wristwatch, let alone a cell phone. During our visits to the park, there sometimes was that older person that wasn’t there with his kid but was just lingering around where kids were. We knew to either stay away from that person or tell a parent or Police Officer that came through.
As social media platforms have rapidly replaced the park and playground, the predators have followed. These predators can easily hide their true self in these online platforms which causes younger minds to not be able to identify them as that “weird man in the park.” And “Stranger Danger” takes on a fuzzy meaning because these kids feel like they know this person who is communicating with them, they’re even ‘friends’ online.
In Jeff Horwitz’s Wall Street Journal article titled, “Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network” dated 6/7/2023, “Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.”
What we as investigators must now do is to leverage the footprint of what these predators leave behind. We won’t spell it out here to publicize the tradecraft, however, a lot can be discovered with hashtags and who’s following who.
A lot of the tradecraft to unmask these criminals is available through our Chorus Intelligence Suite, Request a Demo.
