King County spike in internet crimes targeting kids linked to COVID

From job losses and business closures to domestic violence cases, shootings, and murders, it’s all been on the rise in King County and across the nation this year. Most believe the culprit is COVID-19, and King County prosecutors think the same is true for the recent uptick in internet crimes involving kids, such as child sex abuse, talking sexually to kids either in person or online, and child pornography, whether trading, creating, or possessing.

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“All of the investigative agencies that I work with have seen a huge spike in cases during COVID,” said King County Deputy Prosecutor Laura Harmon.

She noted that they had filed a total of 61 such crimes by the end of last month, compared to 48 for all of 2019.

“It appears to be because there are just more people at home or people on the internet, both children and offenders. [The pandemic] created this perfect storm for offenders to seek out children, offenders to seek out other offenders to try to trade,” she said.

Some of the biggest increases Harmon is seeing involve child pornography.

“Offenders chatting with minors online trying to entice them to take sexualized pictures of themselves. There’s been a huge increase in just the trading of these pictures online between offenders, and uploading them to public websites and forums where they’re seen as invisible,” Harmon said.

We’re not just talking about the deep dark web.

“I think every website that you can probably imagine is in this group of possible platforms that employ these types of things. Platforms that actively search for and find these images on their websites and report it to law enforcement, and that’s where we’ve seen an especially huge spike during COVID,” Harmon explained.

To make matters worse, it’s common for people to get away with these types of crimes.

“The general theory is that there’s a tremendous amount of people that get away with this kind of stuff,” King County Sheriff’s Detective Ben Blakeman said.

“The way that most these companies are finding out users are uploading this stuff is because they’re uploading content that has been previously identified in other investigations as being child pornography, and then those specific files, whether they’re pictures or video, there’s complex software that these companies utilize that is able to identify known child pornography and then immediately flag it,” Blakeman explained. “Whereas if someone is sharing stuff that is not known and has never been identified before, chances are they’re probably going to get away with it.”

Blakeman is part of the King County Sheriff’s Office Special Assault Unit, a nine-person team that focuses on all sex crimes and crimes involving kids, internet or otherwise. On average, the team handles about 600 cases a year. And, like prosecutors, they too are seeing an uptick during the pandemic.

“Unfortunately, that appears to be the case. There’s definitely been an increase either in physical child abuse cases or sexual abuse cases as well,” Blakeman said. “Sadly, I think that once in-person school starts up again, we’ll probably see another large increase because that’s generally the first place that a child has the opportunity to report something happened to them, is to a teacher or a counselor.”

Harmon expects the increase to continue until lockdowns subside and things go back to normal.

The good news is that dedicated teams like Blakeman’s are out there, and they go above and beyond to get those committing these crimes off the street, such as one recent case where Blakeman had to get creative.

“So what we were able to figure out was that there was a specific Facebook account that had been used. And then there was the means of upload was via a Verizon cellular plan,” he explained.

Blakeman determined that the Verizon account and the Facebook account belonged to the same person, which was the suspect in this case, and that he worked for a trucking company based out of Washington state as a long haul trucker.

“Because of that we weren’t able to quickly identify where he lived,” Blakeman said. “We knew where his cellphone payments went to, … but he was never there because he was obviously doing this long-haul trucking stuff, and it looks like he probably lived out of his truck. So what we ended up doing was actually utilizing what we call a ruse in law enforcement.”

“It’s basically a trick, and I was able to contact a company that he works for and figure out a way to contact him, and then I was able to contact him directly, and again continued that ruse,and was ultimately able to convince him to meet with a deputy in North Bend,” Blakeman added.

Blakeman says the ruse was that he convinced the man there was an issue with his commercial vehicle tabs for his truck and that he’d need to meet with an official to be issued a new placard.

In this case, the suspect possessed and traded in child pornography, but had no direct interaction with any of the children in the images. Blakeman says oftentimes child pornography actually involves kids outside the United States, but there are child pornography cases where predators hook up with kids online and convince them to send images or videos of themselves that also ends up traded.

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Both Harmon and Blakeman say the best advice for parents is to talk to their kids about the risks of predators online, educate both themselves and their children, and have a good sense of what it is their children are doing with their screen time.

Parents can find tips on how to start those conversations with their kids and other important resources at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website here.

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