'Sweetie,' a virtual girl created to target child predators
Children's rights group Terre des Homme creates a computer-generated 10-year-old girl in hopes of nabbing adults willing to pay for a child's Webcam sex performance. Mission accomplished.
They thought they were chatting online with a 10-year-old girl in the Philippines. In truth, they were talking to an incredibly realistic-looking computer-generated child. Now that fake girl could help authorities identify very real child predators.
"Sweetie" is the creation of Dutch children's rights organization Terre des Hommes.
Over the course of a 2.5-month sting operation, the group says, Sweetie helped Terre des Hommes identify more than 1,000 adults from 71 countries willing to pay children in developing countries to perform sex acts before a Webcam. On Monday, it announced that it would hand over video footage of the interactions to international police organization Interpol.
Sweetie first interacted with the potential predators in public chat rooms. Researchers made sure to model their alter ego's online conversation, in style and tone, to that of a preteen Filipino girl.