An undercover sting that used a computer-generated girl to tackle webcam child sex tourism has produced its first conviction in Australia
An Australian man has been convicted as a result of an undercover operation in which charity workers pretended to be a 10-year-old girl from the Philippines, as part of a campaign to tackle webcam child sex tourism.
The charity created a computer-generated avatar of ’Sweetie’ which they would show on screen to the men who tried to make contact.
During the 10-week sting, more than 20,000 men interacted with Sweetie.
The names and chat logs of 1,000 of them - many of whom asked 'her' to perform sex acts on camera - have been passed over to the police by the Dutch charity, Terre des Hommes.
110 of those who made contact were British - although so far no arrests have been made.
Webcam child sex tourism is a form of exploitation that tends to involve predators who live in Western countries targeting victims from economically disadvantaged backgrounds - often in South-East Asia - who perform sexual acts on cameras in return for money.
The men will contact the children online through chatrooms and dating sites. They will start with text-based chat in order to agree the terms of payment before moving into a webcam sex show - performed privately over messaging services such as Skype or Yahoo! Messenger.
The children are usually asked to touch themselves, show their genitalia or even perform sex acts with other children or adults.
To create Sweetie, the researchers captured the movements of a real person and applied them to a 3D model of a 10-year-old girl.
An app allowed for researchers to press a button to trigger one of a number of pre-programmed moves such as typing, nodding and shifting in her seat so that it looked as though there was a real girl at the other end of the keyboard.
Terre des Hommes sent the details of more than 1,000 men from 71 countries to Interpol, which then passed the cases on to crime agencies in each country. The National Crime Agency is dealing with the British cases.
The Australian man - Scott Robert Hansen - admitted sending obscene pictures of himself to Sweetie and having child sex abuse images on his computer. He was sentenced to two years in prison by Brisbane District Court.
The BBC has seen some of the chat logs from his conversations with Sweetie, which he starts by asking: “hi u really 9yo?”
The charity worker replied “yes” before he asked to “chat or cam”, adding, “I’m naked, ever seen a guy naked?"
Sure enough, Hansen then turned his webcam on to show that he was naked and then performed a sex act for Sweetie.
“It was very difficult to go to sleep at night after interacting with someone like Hansen,” one of the charity workers posing as Sweetie told the BBC.
The fact that Sweetie wasn't in fact a child was deemed irrelevant by the judge in the case, who said: “If you believe that’s a nine-year-old girl, then that’s the law, that’s good enough.”
