British police warn of online pedophile risk
Within two hours of meeting the "12-year-old girl" through an Internet chat room, the predatory pedophile had already asked to meet her for ***.
Unknown to him the "young girl" in question was actually a covert British police investigator. Detectives based in a specialist unit in London said the startling case illustrated the risk children faced whilst surfing the Internet. "Families will be getting computers for Christmas, children will be using those computers ... and children will be vulnerable unless they are properly supervised," Detective Superintendent Alastair Jeffrey said on Wednesday.
The size of the issue is clear from the figures produced by his London Child Abuse Investigation Command (CAIC), which has six covert online investigators, equating to 10 percent of all those in the country.
Despite being the biggest and best resourced online child protection unit in the country, Jeffrey said they could generate work to occupy the entire team of 425 officers allocated to dealing with pedophiles and child abuse in the British capital. In the last seven months, the CAIC has arrested 22 men including 14 suspects through the work of one online investigator alone.
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