Those who prey on youth on social media are no different from predators who troll playgrounds, pools and arcades, says a Victoria online investigator.
“These guys will first connect with these young people in places like Snapchat, Instagram, and then once they connect with them there, they’ll start to build rapport to break down the stranger stigma,” said Darren Laur, a retired Victoria police officer whose company is called White Hatter.
Laur was responding to news that a 37-year old Oregon man was sentenced this month to 20 years in prison for using social media to stalk and sexually exploit three B.C. teenage girls, coercing them into sending explicit images and then using those images to threaten them.
The three youths, ages 14 and 15 at the time, were in West Shore, Comox Valley and Surrey.
Kevin Robert McCarty, 37, of Happy Valley, Oregon, was sentenced on Oct. 13 after pleading guilty to one count of enticing a minor online and two counts of sexually exploiting children.
Laur said White Hatter, which teaches digital literacy through businesses, organizations and schools, has dealt with 291 victims and their families over the last two years.
Of those, 285 have been males, who are commonly targeted for money and gift cards, while girls are typically targeted for sexual images.
“It’s one of those things that will continue to grow and presently it’s a clear and present threat across North America,” said Laur.
Predators, often in other countries, find out a youth’s IP address, then track down their home community, school, social-media sites and friends, he said.
The B.C. RCMP Integrated Child Exploitation unit receives referrals from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children as well as the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, , Crimestoppers and Interpol.
The numbers have been growing. From 2021 to 2022, reports grew to 9,600 from 4,600.
In the first three months of this year alone, there were more than 5,790 reports.
The B.C. teens who fell victim to McCarty’s stalking might well have heard Laur’s presentation in school or know of the 2012 suicide death of Port Coquitlam’s Amanda Todd, 15, who was blackmailed and harassed into exposing herself in front of a webcam.
“They say: ‘Well that will never happen to me’ and then when all of a sudden they connect with us, they say: ‘It happened to me,’ ” said Laur, adding: “A lot of times it happens because they don’t understand the grooming process.”
About 20 to 29 per cent of all youth are contacted with some form of sexual innuendo, he said, and it often takes less than 30 minutes from connecting to getting an image to making threats.
Predators use aliases, may pose as friends or friends of friends, scrape photos of real Instagram accounts, and use artificial intelligence — “so you think you’re talking to a 16-year-old female and they look like it and sound like it but they’re actually a 45-year-old man in Somalia trying to capture you for the purpose of sexual extortion.”
If a new friend or follower request comes in, Laur suggests researching it, asking other friends to verify them, and checking out their social-media pages, which often have lots of friends but few posts.
He notes that sextortionists try to capture a full-body and face shot to clearly identify the victim.
Snapchat was the primary vehicle used by McCarty to lure the B.C. girls, though he also used Instagram and Google mail and internet voice calls.
He used different user names and aliases, posed as a youth of 17, said he was a famous U.S. musician named Wesley Tucker, and took over the account of a girl in order to start conversations with others.
The first victim was 14 when she began communicating with McCarty in about July 2020. McCarty contacted her via Snapchat and asked to be friends, then moved to Instagram. They began to “date” online.
After three months, McCarty said he was moving to Canada to be with her and she “freaked out” and tried to block him on social media, according to court documents.
She sent more than 50 nude photographs and a video of her performing oral sex on a male at her school. She said she sent the video because McCarty “promised he would leave her alone if she did.”
Instead, he shared the photos and video to get more leverage. He sent her photos of his anatomy. He told her he had “trust issues” as a way to get her passwords, but then locked her out of her own accounts and threatened to rape her little sister.
“She became depressed from McCarty’s constant abuse and started to cut herself,” say court documents.
The girl’s school independently learned McCarty was contacting the student through her school email account, which is controlled and reviewed periodically by staff. Her mother tried to stop the communication in November 2020, when she became aware of the online abuse. Her mother took her devices away.
The young girl was terrified. In one message, McCarty said: “if anything happens to [me] ill cut ur sister’s throat” and “I will get out on bail and murder her.”
In addition to police, the stalking was reported to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
The second victim, who was 15 and from the West Shore, befriended McCarty, who was impersonating a girl her age on Snapchat. The West Shore victim sent two nude photos and was extorted for more. In September 2021, she told a counsellor with the youth outreach team in West Shore that nude images of her were being circulated around school and she was being blackmailed.
McCarty asked for more photos and that she perform oral sex on a boy, saying if she didn’t comply, her nude images would be sent to her friends on Snapchat. He followed through on that threat, posting the images to Snapchat and Instagram.
McCarty told the West Shore student “to slit her writs or to take pills and kill herself.”
She told him he was dealing in child porn but he boasted “the police can’t get him even though they already tried.”
The West Shore student took screen shots of McCarty’s messages that said “good luck getting into a good school with ur underage nudes online. good luck finding a job lol…” He told her he’d harass her every day until he got his images. He offered money.
The third victim, 14, was contacted via Instagram and sent McCarty nude photos and videos of herself masturbating.
Laur said in his experience, the abuser doesn’t usually send the photos to more than one or two people, to prove they are serious.
There are lots of tips for parents and youth on the on how to navigate social media to remain safe.
For those who are extorted, Laur advised immediately stopping all communication, not paying any type of ransom, taking screen grabs of all communication (using another device with Snapchat, as Snapchat shows if messages are copied), and not deleting the account or images.
If police can get the images, he said, they can search for them on the dark web and have them taken down under Project Arachnid, which is used to combat the growing proliferation of child sexual abuse material on the internet.
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