Online sex racket offers kids too

Thiruvananthapuram: Cyber sleuths who broke into the online sex soliciting site ‘Locanto’ were in for a major shock: hidden within a crowd of classifieds seeking partners for sex in the ‘personals’ section of the site were advertisements offering boys and girls. Such classifieds, it has been found, had elicited the most “clicks.” 

The police, in what is considered the first official acknowledgement of the enormity of the menace, strongly suspect that child sex trafficking is one of the major activities indulged in by the over 20 sex soliciting sites active in the state.

The cyber police had nabbed 12 people on October 17 but the investigators were not able to secure any conclusive evidence of child trafficking. “A number of classifieds in many of these sites have children on offer. Their wordings are a bit strange, like code words, but those in the know can easily spot them. Since the people who operate such links work within many layers of protection, it might take time to reach them. But we are closing in,” said a top cyber sleuth involved in the undercover operation. The police are also not sure whether the children are from the state or outside.

In fact, the latest undercover operation was triggered by a set of Facebook group links passed on to the cyber cell by advocate J. Sandhya, member of the State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights. These FB groups had paedophiles sharing photographs of boys and girls and posting lewd and vile comments.