Unemployed high school dropout Tremain Hutchinson spent a lot of time talking to young girls on Tagged. Sometimes he was "Mario," sometimes "Quan" or "Money," but Hutchinson, 28, always pretended to be a cute year-old Georgia boy. He used a photo of a younger cousin in the profiles.
His opening line was always the same: " What's up? You be my freak once a month. I will spoil you, buy you a cell phone, keep your bill paid. Hair, nails done. Buy you shoes, clothes, whatever you want. Dozens of girls responded. One of them was a year-old girl in the Atlanta area who has regretted it ever since, her father says. For weeks, he pressed her for more images. He threatened to post her nude photos online. He threatened to kill her and her parents and blow up her house.
Every time she begged him to leave her alone, he told her he would if she did one more thing. Then came the day he ordered her to do something so unthinkable, it led federal investigators to his door. It's called "Sextortion," a crime exclusive to the digital age. Predators pretend to be teens on social media and gaming sites. They befriend young people, gain their trust and entice them to send lewd photos of themselves. Then they use the photos to extort more and more illicit images.
The number of complaints of online enticement of children is climbing. The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which helps state and local law enforcement agencies fight online child pornography, reports that the number of complaints to its 61 offices nationwide has grown from 5, in to 7, in The crime has serious, even deadly, ramifications for children, say the parents of some who were victims.
Canadian Amanda Todd was one of the earliest and ultimately most prominent victims. When she was 13, in , the Vancouver-area girl used video chats to meet other teens. She became friends with someone who talked her into showing her breasts during a webcam chat.
