Child Exploitation and Online Protection

Our Story

Our 12 year old daughter enjoyed many a night chatting with her friends from school on the MSN network. This was all quite innocent fun but their group became infiltrated by a paedophile. He made sexually explicit comments and suggestions to the girls over a number of days and had managed to glean enough information from their general chatting to know what school they went to. He made threats that he was going to come and get them and take them away from their school which had all the girls crying to their parents.

As soon as my daughter told me what was going on my husband sat at the computer (which is in the front room of the house) and with an immense amount of self control just watched the paedophile typing sexually explicit comments to our 12 year old daughter.

We contacted the local police who took down as much information as possible about the incident but we didn’t hold out much hope for anything happening because all we could tell them about this person was their MSN user name and the time it happened.

Here’s what happened next.

• The local police station immediately passed our limited information on to CEOP.
• CEOP contacted Microsoft (they host the MSN network) and informed them they were the paedophile unit and had a person they wanted to trace urgently.
• 30 Microsoft staff processed through millions and millions of MSN records looking for the user name at the time specified and within half an hour found it.
• Microsoft passed on to CEOP what IP address the user in question had and the Internet Service Provider they used.
• CEOP then contacted the Internet Service Provider and again told them they were the paedophile unit and needed to urgently trace a user.
• The Internet Service Provider searched through who was allocated that IP address at the time in question and within 20 minutes passed the users billing details on to CEOP.
• CEOP then contacted the local police where the paedophile lived and within 2 hours he was in police custody
• Total time from reporting the incident to the man sat in a police cell was approximately 4 hours.

We had a phone call from our local police station the next morning to let us know the man was now in police custody. It later transpired that when the man was arrested the police also confiscated his computers which was found to be full of child pornography.

Morral of the story

• Keep a close eye on your childrens online activities
• If someone does manage to get through, then report it to your local police (they DO know what they're doing and WILL get the person)
• Don't talk to the person. If they realise the police are on to them they will start delete bits off their computer.

We are committed to doing all we can to support CEOP but are equally committed to informing parents and children on the dangers of the internet.

CEOP Information for Parents and Children

CEOP Most Wanted Initiative

Have You Seen These People?

Click the CEOP Missing child sex offenders banner below and if you can provide any details on the missing offenders, let the police know.