Three men investigated in Santa Cruz de Tenerife for extorting minors for pornographic purposes

This is the ‘Worldpsex’ operation, which investigates a crime of corruption of minors to pornographic purposesthreats and extortion through a Turkish instant messaging application.

These 15 people, three of them in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, are being investigated for an alleged crime of corruption of minors for pornographic purposes in the online ‘child grooming’ modality, after contacting the victim by mobile phone and tricking the victim to obtain sending content images, videos, audios sexual character and sometimes a virtual approach through video calls with sexual content.

The investigations began when a neighbor from a town in Albacete reported to the Civil Guard that she had detected on her 12-year-old daughter’s mobile phone, explicit pornographic content coming from chat users of a mobile instant messaging application. The analysis carried out on the mobile phone detected how the minor had registered in the investigated application, publicly sharing an image of herself accompanied by another minor on her profile.

This image, spread virally through the application, detected in the first hours how 56 users, taking advantage of the characteristics and anonymity of the application, contacted the minor to carry out sexting sessionsin order to obtain images, videos or audios of sexual content, convincing her to make this type of content, after receiving pornographic files.

The Edite investigation was able to prove that some users achieved their goal of virtual rapprochement, through making video calls with high sexual content through the chat of the aforementioned application.

The civil guards in charge of the investigation managed to find out specific and precise information about several of those involved, despite the fact that the majority had used anti-forensic techniques to avoid being located and hide their identity, hiding or modifying the IPS of the terminals with which they connected.

Specifically, one of the authors, a resident of Madrid, had created three different profiles in the messaging application, making the victim believe that he was talking to different people. After tricking her, he got her to send him multimedia files with sexual content, and once he had them in his possession, the threatened and coerced so that the sending of files would have more explicit content, extorting her by spreading her files on the Internet to other users if she did not agree to his demands, going so far as to make virtual approaches with the minor by making several video calls with high sexual content. After being identified and located, this individual was arrested.