Are you a cop?: Identifying suspicion in online chat operations with online groomers.

BACKGROUND: The increase in online enticement has led to law enforcement agencies engaging in more proactive policing through undercover chat sting operations. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to identify the topics and communication strategies triggering suspicion in chats between law enforcement officers and offenders and why those topics do not result in suspicion in victim-offender conversations. METHODS: We conducted a thematic analysis identifying: (1) how LEOs trigger suspicion, (2) how offenders communicate suspicion, (3) how LEOs attempt recovery from suspicion, and (4) how these triggers were present but did not trigger suspicion in victim-offender chats. We examined 20 LEO-offender chats and 20 victim-offender chats from US ICAC task forces. RESULTS: We identified four themes that triggered suspicion: risk assessment by the LEO's persona, LEO avoidance measures, details related to the offense and evidence, and proof of identity of chat participants. Offender responses to triggers revealed three themes: discomfort navigating boundaries and uncertainty, risk identification, and risk mitigation. Themes for the LEO's responses to suspicion included: risk assessment for chatters, issues with technology, appeasement, and negative emotional reactions. Finally, juxtaposing triggers onto minor-offender chats yielded four themes: explicit boundary setting, victim risk assessment, deep relationship forming and disclosures, and technology issues. CONCLUSION: This study has implications for law enforcement agencies seeking to reduce suspicion and risk assessment by offenders during internet sting operations.

A scoping review of child grooming strategies: pre- and post-internet.

BACKGROUND: Researchers have studied the online sexual grooming of minors extensively since the early 2000s. However, the grooming process is neither new nor restricted to digital media. While grooming and child sexual abuse existed long before the Internet, the advent of the Internet has resulted in more ways in which offenders can interact with candidate victims including offline-only, online-only, and a mix of offline and online. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we conducted a scoping review of grooming strategies both pre- and post-Internet. Our goal was to enumerate strategies analyzed in both time periods, provide similarities and differences, and discuss how changing datasets and technology have impacted the grooming process in both online and offline environments. METHODS: We performed a scoping review of peer-reviewed journal articles from 1970 to 2020 within PubMed, Medline, PsychInfo, and ERIC. This resulted in 19,679 unique articles. Titles and abstracts were screened resulting in 266 articles which were then read in full, resulting in 93 papers which qualified based on inclusion criteria. RESULTS: Grooming strategies identified pre-Internet included: enticements, coercion, isolation, substance abuse, gradual sexualization, and secrecy. In comparison, the strategies identified post-Internet were: enticements, risk assessment, trust, sexualization, fantasy, secrecy, isolation, meeting, media progression, deception, coercion, substance use as a tool, authority, and repetition. CONCLUSIONS: While grooming strategies overlapped pre and post-Internet, the timing and scope of concepts differed. Additionally, grooming offline began to incorporate technology post-Internet which functioned to increase accessibility and isolation of the victim in a similar manner to online grooming.

Chat Analysis Triage Tool: Differentiating contact-driven vs. fantasy-driven child sex offenders.

Investigating crimes against children, specifically sexual solicitations, are complicated because not all offenders are contact-driven, meaning they want to meet the minor for sex in the physical world; instead, some offenders are fantasy-driven, in that they are more interested in cybersex and role-play. In addition, the sheer volume of cases involving the online sexual solicitation of minors makes it difficult for law enforcement to determine whether an offender is contact-driven vs. fantasy-driven. However, research shows that there are language-based differences between minors and contact-driven offenders vs. fantasy driven-offenders. Thus, we developed the Chat Analysis Triage Tool (CATT), a forensically sound investigative tool that, based on natural language processing methods, analyzes and compares chats between minors and contact-driven vs. non-contract driven offenders. Using an SVM classifier, we were successful in differentiating the classes based on character trigrams. In a matter of seconds, the existing algorithms provide an identification of an offender's risk level based on the likelihood of contact offending as inferred from the model, which assists law enforcement in their ability to triage and prioritize cases involving the sexual solicitation of minors.