DHAKA: Enlisting the help of a computer-generated 10-year-old Philippine girl, Dutch children’s rights activists turned online sex predators into their prey.

In an online sting operated from an anonymous warehouse office in an Amsterdam industrial park, activists from Terre des Hommes set out to gauge the scale of a fast-growing internet phenomenon the Netherlands-based group calls webcam child sex tourism.

The result was shocking, the group’s director of projects, Has Guyt told media on Monday at the tiny Amsterdam office where Terre des Hommes used the 3D digital animated girl they dubbed Sweetie to unmask 1,000 internet users they say wanted to pay to watch a child engage in sex acts via webcam, The Times of India publishes this report on Wednesday.

‘If we don’t intervene soon, this sinister phenomenon will totally run out of control,’ Terre des Hommes director of projects Hans Guyt told media as he stood in front of a wall plastered with the pixelated faces of adults duped by Sweetie.

He said webcam sex with minors, which usually involves men from wealthy Western countries paying children from impoverished countries for sex shows, is still ‘a cottage industry’ and needs to be stamped out now.

‘It’s still not too late,’ Guyt said, ‘Our worst scenario is that the same thing will happen with this as has happened with child pornography, that is now a multibillion dollar industry in the hands of criminal gangs’.

BDST: 1752 HRS, NOV 06, 2013
RoR/SRS