New Delhi: According to media reports, Discord, a popular chatting platform among teens, is being used by some adults in hidden communities and chat rooms to prepare children for kidnapping, trading child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and extorting minors. to whom they induce to send nude photos. ,
According to NBC News, over the past six years, about 35 cases of adults being prosecuted for “kidnapping, grooming or sexual assault” have been identified that allegedly involved Discord communications.
Of those, at least 15 have resulted in guilty pleas or verdicts, with “many more” awaiting trial. Those figures only include cases that were reported, investigated and prosecuted, all of which present significant challenges for victims and their advocates.
“What we’re seeing is only the tip of the iceberg,” Stephen Sawyer, director of the tipline at the Canadian Center for Child Protection (C3P), was quoted as saying.
In addition, reports say a teenager who was taken across state borders, raped and found locked in a backyard shed in March was groomed for months on Discord, according to police. In another case, a 22-year-old man kidnapped a 12-year-old girl after meeting her over a video game and grooming her on Discord, according to prosecutors.
The report identified an additional 165 cases, including four crime circles, of charges of extortion against adults for transmitting or receiving CSAM through Discord, or for allegedly sending sexually graphic images of themselves. He was prosecuted for using the platform for sextortion, also known as sextortion.
Furthermore, the report notes that Discord is not the only tech platform dealing with the persistent problem of online child abuse, as several reports from the past year have suggested. There is a 474 percent increase in CSAM reports on Discord from 2021 to 2022, according to an analysis of reports made to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
According to NCMEC Senior Vice President John Sheehan, child abuse and abuse content has increased exponentially on Discord. Sheehan was quoted as saying, “There is an issue of child abuse on stage. It cannot be denied.” Launched in 2015, Discord quickly emerged as a hub for online gamers and teenagers, and is now used by over 150 million people globally. Last month, Discord notified users about a data breach after a third-party support agent’s account was compromised.
According to BleepingComputer, the agent’s support ticket queue was compromised in the security breach, thereby exposing users’ email addresses, messages exchanged with Discord support, and any attachments sent as part of tickets. Was. In April, cyber-security researchers discovered a new malware distributed on Discord which has more than 300 million active users.