A thousand men were caught trying to pay a computer-generated child named 'Sweetie' to perform sex acts online. Among the 1,000 caught, nearly half of them were from the US, the UK and India.
The initiative was taken by a Dutch children's charity Terre des Hommes that had set up a fake profile online. The computer avatar, who posed as a pre-teen 10-year-old Filipino girl chatted merrily with unsuspecting child predators in public chat rooms, even as the activists tracked their profiles on social networks such as Facebook, Skype handles, phone numbers, photos and video footage.
The sting was carried out around for 10 week near Amsterdam in which around 20,000 men contacted her. Around 5 percent of them offered her money to perform sex acts online.
Of the total 1,000 men who were willing to offer cash, 254 were from US, 110 from UK and 103 from India.
"Our worst-case scenario is that the same will happen with this phenomenon as with child pornography, which is now a multi-billion industry in the hands of criminal gangs," said managing director Albert Jaap van Santbrink.
The charity has handed over their findings to police for further investigations.
"We believe that criminal investigations using intrusive surveillance measures should be the exclusive responsibility of law enforcement agencies," spokesman Soren Pedersen said.
Andy Baker, of the UK's National Crime Agency has praised the campaign and said it had "widened awareness of a global child sex abuse threat".
"Working with our international law enforcement partners, we will now look at the information being passed on by Terre des Hommes," he later added.
In one of the many conversations, Sweetie and her chat partner agreed on a $20 fee. The fee was to be paid by a wire transfer. Sweetie ended the chat after taking the person's Skype address.
"We want governments to adopt proactive investigation policies that give law enforcement agencies the mandate to actively patrol public Internet hot spots where this child abuse is taking place every day," Hans Guyt, director of campaigns at Terre des Hommes Netherlands, said. "The child predators doing this now feel that the law doesn't apply to them. The Internet is free, but not lawless."
