US agency detects 30,000 online child abusers in Madhya Pradesh; over 4,000 likely to be arrested

BHOPAL: The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has identified more than 30,000 people in Madhya Pradesh who allegedly circulated suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM), including pornography, online enticement and contact offenses.
The MP Police plans a major crackdown and has identified 4,000-plus 'actionable' cases from the NCMEC CyberTipline data received from central intelligence. The other 26,000 cases are under scrutiny. Potential arrest lists are being dispatched from the state cyber cell headquarters to 10 districts, sources in the home department told TOI.

The number of arrests will then cross the 3,500 in Vyapam, India's biggest recruitment scam. As per NCMEC data, Indore tops the list of maximum CSAM uploads, with more than 2,000 cases, followed by over 1,000 in Bhopal, sources in the home ministry said.
Around 500 to 600 cases have been reported from other cities, including Gwalior, Jabalpur, Dhar and Khargone. The state cyber HQ has shared the data - IP addresses, locations and devices used - with SPs for further action.
"Arresting 4,000 people is going to be a herculean task, but we will take action," said a police officer, adding that investigations so far suggest that none of the girls in any of the illegal content were from MP. "The videos are of girls from other countries. They were downloaded, uploaded or shared on social media platforms," he said.
Officers also said that in some cases, the content cannot be termed as CSAM. "One of the videos, for instance, appears to be from a village and shows an old woman feeding an infant, who is unclothed. This content may have been flagged by an AI-based detection system.
We don't find it actionable as of today," said the officer. Social media platforms use trackers for data on child porn videos, he said. "Such software has an algorithm that scans for nudity and expression of stress on the face of a child, following which an alert is generated and the content is passed on to law enforcement agencies. When photos or videos are found not linked to child pornography, cases are dropped," he explained.
Police in chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan's government - which has a zero tolerance for crimes against women and children and has a law for death penalty to child rapists - have been using this data to track CSAM offenders. Around 50 people have been arrested in the last few years.
In 2017, the MP government had approved a bill for death sentence for the rape of girls aged 12 and below. MP courts awarded the capital punishment to 72 offenders since then, judgements being delivered within a week in some cases.
NCMEC, America's centralised reporting system for online exploitation of children, had been sharing these 'CyberTipline reports' with India following an agreement it signed with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) on February 29, 2019.
What is CyberTipline
CyberTipline was created so that children and their parents can swiftly report suspected incidents of child sexual exploitation that occur on the Internet, including activities involving the possession, manufacture, and distribution of child pornography, online enticement of children for sexual purposes, child prostitution, child sex tourism, child sexual molestation, and unsolicited obscene material sent to a child. Alerts are posted by citizens on a dedicated website or number or through AI, which are converted into actionable reports.