How do groomers find victims online?

Groomers can use many aspects of online technologies to find and choose their victims. The following is a list of some of the ways groomers select victims online.

• Groomers often search for victims in chatrooms, especially those ‘chats’ that are specifically focused around young people’s interests (e.g. a teen chatroom, gaming forum, or music-themed chatroom).

• Groomers might pretend to be younger than they actually are, or of a different gender, especially if they want their victims to think that they might be a good potential friend or girl/boy friend. However, many groomers do not lie about their real age or gender at all, and still manage to find victims!

• Groomers might manipulate victims to contact them in the first instance. This can sometimes make them look more innocent and trustworthy, and the victim as being more complicit in the grooming, for example:

‘any girls out there who can tell me where to buy pink lip-gloss cheap?’

• Groomers might have online profiles on dating sites and other sites where people meet each other (e.g. penpal sites, newsgroups, gaming sites etc). These might be real or fictitious. Photos of other people can be easily used in place of their own.

• Groomers can hunt for potential victims by looking through personal websites. Examples of such sites include: blogs (online diaries), pictures, and sites that ‘give out’ personal information and pictures about young people, and some school and sporting club websites. For more information about how to set up a safer website click here.

• People with an interest in grooming victims online sometimes work together with other groomers and sex-offenders to help each other find and groom victims.

• Groomers often move between different cyber-technologies as they position themselves for abuse. For example, they might select a victim from a picture and profile they found online from a school website. They then might meet the victim in an open chatroom and then go into a private chatroom, where they start exchanging emails, messages, pictures and videos. After this, they might even send the victim a prepaid mobile phone that they can keep in secret to talk with the groomer.