Chat site video-pairs kids with strangers; complaint filed in Ahmedabad

AHMEDABAD: Supriya Shah (name changed), the mother of two adolescent girls from Bodakdev area, and an IT professional, was appalled when she saw her younger daughter, nine years old, hooked to a website which boldly announced 'Talk to Strangers' as its tag.
She found that her daughter was randomly paired on video chats with strangers - men in 40s and 20s - staring curiously on their screens, sending "Hi's" and asking for a video chat.

"I asked my daughter if she knew them and she said 'No'. Mamma they are strangers, that's what the website is all about." But what scared Supriya was the conversation. "My daughter told me a few strangers asked her to turn around in front of the camera. Said she was beautiful and that she had good voice. She also told me sometimes the strangers also got curious to know what was on her T-shirt and even asked her to lift her shirt a few inches, which she did. I was horrified," Supriya told TOI.
Her younger daughter was first drawn to chat site while watching a live streaming game of 'Minecraft' on YouTube. One of the visitors recommended the site and then her four friends also recommended the site. By late March this year, Supriya lodged a complaint with the Cybercrime police with screenshots of the website and the strangers that appeared on the screen. "Of the nine instances, I was paired once with a semi-naked man," added Supriya.
She got across to her friends in the UK, where she worked with a network security firm in 2020, and traced the data linked to her phone's IP address on the chat sites servers. She immediately emailed and alerted the CyberTipline managed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US which helps to take down any data related to child predation even on the dark web.
The cyber cell of Gujarat CID crime has written via the state home department to the Union ministry of home to block the site after Supriya's complaint, say sources.
"I hounded the owner of the chat site to give back my child's data and even sent him screenshots of my IP address on the website's server," she told TOI. When asked how her daughter was pulled to the site, she said, "After the lockdown, I had parental control on all of my multimedia devices. But it was when I got Covid in late 2021 that my daughters went to stay with their grandparents and accessed this chat site through their phone," recalls Supriya.