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Pedophiles Shift Away From Web & Into Texting

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Apr 24, 2008 10:38 pm US/Mountain

Pedophiles Shift Away From Web & Into Texting

Written by Rick Sallinger, rsallinger@cbs.com

DENVER (CBS4) ― Guarding your children against predators is a 24-hour-a-day task. Many parents take precautions to monitor their child's computer use, but there is a new way pedophiles are hooking up with children: on their cell phones. It's done by text messaging.

The adults troll chat rooms on the computer, obtains the child's phone number from them and goes from there.

They may think they won't get caught, but that's no longer the case.

The recent arrest of a 50-year-old U.S. Air force employee, based at NORAD in Colorado Springs, followed a month long series of text messages with a decoy.

"Who did he think he was communicating with?" CBS4 reporter Rick Sallinger asked Mike Harris, an investigator with the Jefferson County Colorado District Attorney's Office. "A teenage girl under the age of 15," was the reply.

"See u later today, keep it warm for me," stated one of the final messages that investigators received.

Among the items found on the suspect were condoms, a camera and sex toys.

"Did you think you were texting a little girl?" Sallinger asked the suspect. "No," the response.

Police say pedophiles fearing capture through stings on the computer are switching to text messaging on cell phones.

"It's harder to track text messaging and the suspects know this, but also kids go to school they don't take their computer with them, but kids take that cell phone everywhere," Harris said.

One 13-year-old girl interviewed by CBS4 was given a cell phone by her mother. She used it to access a chat room where she met a man who posed as a teen.

"Did you suspect that this could be dangerous?" CBS4 asked.
"No," She said, "Because there were people telling me what to do and helping me out when I had problems."

But the teen she arranged to meet through texting turned out to be a man who then sexually assaulted her.

The girl's mother called it "probably the worst day of my life"

"You thought your daughter was safe just using a cell phone?" CBS4 asked.
"Yes -- I didn't even know you could get into a chat room on a cell phone," the mother said.

Ironically, she had refused to give her daughter a computer, fearing sexual predators trolling the Internet.

Software is now being marketed to parents to keep an eye on their children's phones.

CBS4 asked several teens how they would you feel about their parents monitoring their text messages.

"I would probably cry, because they're my text messages," one girl replied.

The 13-year-old sexual assault victim now has a different view of texting.

"It's not that fun," she said.

The crackdown on Internet pedophiles is now catching up on texters, hoping they, too, will get the message.

(© MMIX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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