Children are being blackmailed into committing random crimes including vandalism, assaults and killing pets by online gangs exploiting them for amusement, the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) conference in Killarney has heard.
Mick Moran, a long-time member of An Garda Síochána’s Domestic and Sexual Violence Investigation Unit said the phenomenon was well established in Europe and that cases have now been seen in Ireland.
In addition to exploitation, he said the online “radicalisation” of children, some of them not yet in their teens, was also a growing issue.
“One of the things that the guards are dealing with at the moment is kids who are really very good kids who then go out and do the most bizarre stuff ever, like smash all the windows in their neighbour’s car, kill a cat, or go out and kick a homeless man in the face ... 12 year olds, 13-year-old kids,” he told the gathering of doctors on Friday.
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Moran spent 11 years seconded to Europol in France before leaving the force and being appointed chief executive of the Irish Internet Hotline, the national reporting service for illegal internet content in Ireland.
“Often they are victims of what are known as Com groups, or 764 groups, where they are sexually extorted and then, instead of being extorted for sex in the real world, or for the production of new child sexual abuse material (CSAM), they are actually being ordered to do [such] things.”
This, he said, was usually for the entertainment of those blackmailing them who were often young people. The groups were in the news in the United States where parents, teachers and carers were warned to be vigilant against the targeting of minors online.
Children are increasingly being influenced online by bad actors at a critical time in their development with the result that they are effectively being “radicalised”, he said.
“When we talk about radicalisation online, we think of Islamic terrorism because that’s what it was but these kids are being radicalised by the manosphere, they’re being radicalised by people they’re meeting and seeing and they’re now being radicalised by sycophantic chatbots driven by narrow AI; these machines in their bedrooms that are chatting to them and agreeing with everything they’re saying.
“So you have to understand that these kids’ influences, are no longer their parents or their brothers and sisters or their teachers.”
, He said GPs must be aware of what are emerging realities in the lives of patients, families and children.
Moran, whose group is mainly funded by the Government and EU, described Silicon Valley as “capitalism out of control” and said social media was “the best example of that”.
