After helping smash an Internet child porn ring that saw local teens blackmailed into performing explicit sexual acts, city cops warned more sickos could target kids by assuming their friends' identities.
"There are, I'm sure, other people out there doing it," said Staff Sgt. Howard Kunce of the northern Alberta Integrated Child Exploitation Team.
"You've got people out there luring teens, you've got people out there doing this type of thing, you've got people out there accessing, downloading or distributing child porn."
Technology writer Rick Broadhead agreed, saying parents need to take extra precautions to ensure their kids are speaking with friends and not someone who's assumed their friends' identity.
"I think it would be very, very unlikely this is an isolated incident," said Broadhead, a Toronto-base writer. "There's no question there are predators lurking in chat rooms."
While there's no doubt predators lurk in chat rooms, Broadhead said this case shows a hacker can assume an identity and use it to target people.
They received another message saying, "I'm not who you think I am" and the person made more demands or he'd show the pictures to their friends and parents and put them on the Internet.
The accused then went into the girls' "buddy lists" and assumed their identities in order to lure more young girls in the same way, police said.
The girls, who ranged in age from nine to 15, were threatened with rape, bodily harm and death if they didn't co-operate, Ontario Provincial Police said.
Mark Gary Bedford, 21, of Kingston, Ont, is charged with two counts of child luring, two counts of possessing child pornography, three counts of making child pornography, two counts of distributing child pornography and three counts of extortion.
Kunce figures with the amount of press attention the case has garnered, more kids will come forward with stories of what happened to them on the Internet.
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