Spam sends sexual content to youth

Times Reporter 

 

During the month of January Strathmore RCMP had two separate reported incidents of sexually explicit messages being sent among elementary schools. The complaints were investigated with the help of the RCMP Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) Unit. 

The messages are originating from the social media site Kik. The messages were sent to a variety of people, adults and children, but it was the parents who would report the content after finding photos of naked women on their kids’ phones or devices. Those parents believed their child was being lured due to the graphic content of the messages. 

“They’re not being lured, it’s basically a modern spam that just happens to be a little bit interactive. Specifically it’s a Chabot, so what that is, is basically a mathematical algorithm that’s used to emulate … speech patterns,” said ICE Staff Sgt. John Guigon. 

A message is received from a random number saying ‘hi, my name is so and so’ or is just a smiley face. If you delete it right away then it’s done and nothing to worry about. 

If you respond, no matter what the response is, it begins creating a sexual conversation and sends sexual content. The more you reply, the more it pushes, sending you more and more photos and messages.  

“Most of them because they are so young, delete it right away. We just want people to be aware because I know one school that reported actually thought the kids were sending it out but, no,” said Const. Andrea Dyck with the Strathmore RCMP.

Guigon’s advice is to tell your kids that they shouldn’t respond to a text they don’t know, and that would solve the problem. The computer program doesn’t know if it is sending to men, women or children, it is just mining the 100 million Kik users to try and get them to the adult website. 

It is not a criminal offense, unfortunately, said Guigon; adult websites and nude pictures of women are not illegal, it’s just really annoying spam. 

If you or your child uses Kik and receives a message from a random number, then the best advice Guigon has is to contact Kik directly.  

“What I would do is lodge complaints with Kik. I know Kik is trying to remedy the situation but it’s not working so far,” said Guigon.

“If you get them call Kik. They certainly didn’t put this on their service but they are responsible for trying to get rid of it.”