Manipulating children into online games

Former FBI Special Agent Randall Devine, shares advice for parents on how sex offenders can manipulate children into online games with them
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Manipulating children into online games

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I recognized an interesting thing over the last couple of years about and regarding how online child sex offenders will target and find children. An interesting development was the use of video games. Some of the newer video games are spectacular and they incorporate the use of the internet because the player can wear a headset and interact with other players; now a child sex offender found a perfect form to contact children outside the interest and recognition of law enforcement. So, what they will do is play the game, get very good at the game and get to know the children in an effort to get to know them online; develop a relationship which would lead to child exploitation. Another interesting game we saw that is being played by a child sex offenders’ online was a game that I’m not even sure if there’s a name for it, but a child sex offender will set themselves up as a sort of a referee and there is only one player, and that will be the child. They will encourage the child to accumulate points for different behaviours that they would like to see. One of the behaviours is revealing certain things about their identity like, what might be their middle name, first name, or what street they live on, what city they live in, in an effort to collect identity information so they can identify the child for that purposes. Another thing would be exploiting them to take a picture of themselves, a very first innocuous picture of e.g. their hand, and then, (using just a bit of an illustration to avoid salacious details) take a picture of their hand and then they would use the picture of their hand to break down a barrier to say, that you’ve already sent me 1 picture, that it’s easy enough for you to send me another, and that might be the picture of a snowball, taking a picture of their wrist, and maybe their elbow and then it’s getting more and more explicit. The point of which or the objective of which is to collect this mystical points, it can’t be redeemed for them, but children closely associate with the accumulation of points, because it’s associates to a game, or even some of the things that they might do for their education, for their school online.

Former FBI Special Agent Randall Devine, shares advice for parents on how sex offenders can manipulate children into online games with them

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Randall Devine

FBI Agent

Randall Devine is a Special Agent with the FBI working in the Los Angeles area. 

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