"Sweetie" led to the arrest of men from 71 countries who approached her profile seeking sexual activity. For the first time, a pedophile who sought to approach a child's digital profile has been convicted.
An Australian man is considered the first in the world to be convicted without having approached a real minor, but only a digital version of him, a creation of the Dutch charity Terre des Hommes.
The undercover operation that centered on Sweetie's profile used the fictional 9-year-old from the Philippines to attract pedophiles from around the world. The results were impressive, as the data of 1,000 men from 71 countries around the world was collected, who sought out, located and "negotiated" with Sweetie. Many thousands more were not adequately identified.
The convicted man, Scott Robert Hansen, was already known to the authorities for similar offenses. He paid with two years in prison for, among other things, sending sexually explicit photos to the 9-year-old girl.
He, like the rest, asked Sweetie to do specific things in front of her computer camera, offering financial reward.
conversations
between Hansen and the operators of the digital minor's profile. "Hi, are you really 9 years old?" the pedophile asked, and when Sweetie replied "Yes" he asked her: "Do you want to chat or talk on camera with someone older?"
Then, he became much more demanding, as he initially told her “I like Asian chicks, are you up for some action?” and then wrote that “I’m naked, have you ever seen a naked man?” Immediately after, he turned on his own camera and engaged in erotic activities, believing that the person watching him was a nine-year-old girl.
As the presiding judge, Ms. Ryrie, emphasized during the sentencing, the fact that it was not a real girl was irrelevant. "If you believe she is a nine-year-old, the law is clear, that is enough."
Creepy moments
The Dutch team worked on the program for two and a half months, posing as girls from the Philippines in a chat room in 2013. Sometimes they even used digital avatars to convince pedophiles that they were indeed underage girls.
One of the operators of these profiles told the BBC that "Some of those we contacted really gave me nightmares."
Specifically for Hansen, he said that "he was particularly straightforward, at one point he even asked us to bring Sweetie's -nonexistent- 8-year-old sister into the game. It was really hard to go to sleep at night, when I had talked to someone like him before."
As he emphasizes, there are much worse ones: "He was probably not the most serious, not even in the group of the most serious" in terms of the threat he poses to children, as he said.
Source: ethnos.gr
