Crime & Safety

Fighting Cybercrime with Chat

The Bartow County Sheriff's Office is now an affiliate of Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Internet Crimes Against Children unit.

ASL, LOL, B4N, CD9 — Recognize any of those Internet chat room acronyms?

Two investigators are getting some practice with them and chats, but it’s not for fun — they’re hoping to catch people who arrange to meet children for sex via chat rooms. They call it “undercover chat” and each poses as a 13- or 14-year-old child but leaves it up to others in the chat rooms to initiate contact and direct the conversation.

Now a part of the Georgia Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force administered by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, local detectives have with sexual exploitation of a child — he allegedly was planning to visit for sex who he thought was a 14-year-old girl in Cartersville. The Covington man was actually chatting with Investigator Holly McKamey.

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“It’s a good tool to catch child predators. There’s so many out there that [children] get on the Internet and don’t realize to whom they’re actually talking when they get on the computer,” said Maj. Doug Duncan, who heads the department’s Criminal Investigation Division. “We can use this to hopefully get those predators off the streets or off the computers.”

McKamey and Investigator Marc Barrere — who also investigate other types of cases — completed weeks of GBI training and went online in October, but the time they have to combat the problem could limit their reach in the future.

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“It’s going to vary because we have to sustain our case load, and this is additional. It is time consuming because I could go online right now and in 10 minutes have someone telling me things I should do that you wouldn’t believe, but ideally, we want them to come to us,” Barrere said. “This is our jurisdiction. Otherwise, it’s a lot more complicated because we can take warrants, but have to rely on another agency to make the arrest.”

Getting suspects to come to Bartow is a game of building trust, McKamey said. And investigators are dealing with people in other states and even in Canada.

Identifying the person on the other end of a chat connection also is tricky business.

“It’s all anonymous,” McKamey said. Barrere added that nailing down an IP address to identify a suspect also is time consuming.

“For us, it’s not as immediate as we would like,” he said. “Ideally, we would like to be able to take an IP address and send it to whoever is providing them Internet service, but we can’t do that. We have to get court orders and follow protocol.”

While GBI has its own unit conducting similar investigations, it also provides the necessary equipment to local law enforcement agencies and facilitates the sharing of information between jurisdictions across the country.

“We share information with other agencies who are ICAC members,” Barerre said. “They’re able to obtain people that we’ve looked at or people that are chatting with us and if they’re chatting with those same people, we’re able to find out what kind of chats their getting.”

The affiliation with GBI’s ICAC program also means local investigators can step in when other agencies need help. Duncan said there have been occasions when other agencies identified people in Bartow County who were chatting and enticing children. In those cases, Bartow authorities would be called upon to execute search warrants and make arrests.

“It just helps the GBI with jurisdictional cases because if we’re not an affiliate with them then they work all the tips — they have a cyber tip line and they work all those cases — and a lot of them do occur here in Bartow County," McKamey said. "Since now we’re an affiliate, we can work those cases in conjunction with them and it’s a lot easier.”

Do you know any of those acronyms? Most who text or chat are familiar with “laughing out loud” but according to safesurfingkids.com, the others stand for:

• ASL — Age, sex (male or female) and location (state);

• B4N — Bye for now; and

• CD9 — Code 9 or parents are around.

See the complete list of acronyms here.


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