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Sex sting sheds light on dark side of Internet

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Editor’s note: The Shawano Leader was allowed behind-the-scenes access to Shawano County’s participation in Operation Vanguard over the weekend. This is the last of three articles on the sting and related issues.

Arrests made last weekend in a wide-ranging Internet sex sting may have succeeded in foiling 19 alleged child predators, but it also leaves unanswered the question of how many others may still be out there.

Authorities from Shawano County and other northeast Wisconsin agencies posed online as 15-year-olds during Operation Vanguard. They posted ads seeking to make social contact and ended up being inundated with responses — some from parties looking to have sex.

Capt. Tom Tuma of the Shawano County Sheriff’s Department was in contact with some of the investigators during the operation and said it was frightening how busy they were as they tried to keep up with responses to the online ads.

“If this kind of thing is going on as frequently as it seems, people are putting themselves at an extremely elevated risk of danger,” Tuma said.

The operation spearheaded by the Brown County Sheriff’s Department resulted in the arrests of roughly six people for every day it was held — people who responded to ads placed by who they believed were children and made arrangements to meet them for sex.

“We’ll never know the true numbers. We’ll never know what’s really out there and how many times does something happen and it just goes unreported,” said Shawano County Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Gordon Kowaleski, who said it’s unknown how many more arrests could have been made.

“Certainly there’s more people out there that we could chat with and end up with the same results,” he said. “How many? I don’t know.”

Also unknown is how many times these kind of Internet exchanges have taken place where the children were really children and not cops.

“That is the horrible part of this, and we’ll never know the answer to that,” Kowaleski said. “That’s just a huge unknown. And you have to put yourself in the place of the child. We pose as a 15-year-old, but does that mean there aren’t 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds out there that are responding or communicating with some of these individuals? We don’t know that.”

Shawano County Sheriff’s Detective Chris Gamm, who also worked on Operation Vanguard, said one of the suspects arrested admitted to a sexual encounter with a juvenile.

“Brown County had an arrest over the weekend where the suspect did admit to the sexual assault of a 15-year-old,” he said.

In Shawano County, one of the more notorious cases of Internet contacts gone wrong was the case of a 13-year-old girl who developed an Internet relationship with an 18-year-old fugitive from a Texas juvenile facility who attempted to take her away to Vermont in 2011.

Xan Boyett had identified himself over the Internet as a 23-year-old man named Matt O’Conor. He was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison on a charge of attempted abduction.

“For our young people that may be engaged in this, they don’t know who they’re meeting, they don’t know who they’re getting in the car with,” Tuma said.

“I think that’s the key point here,” Kowaleski said. “You don’t know who’s on the other end on the computer.”

Growing up with interactive social media may have made this generation more technically savvy, but the downside is many of them are unaware of the dangers associated with it.

“For this generation, this technology is neutral,” Tuma said. “It is what it is. They grew up with it. Our generation didn’t. We recognize some of the dangers to them. They often don’t see the danger in it because it’s so commonplace.”

Kowaleski said that places a greater burden on parents to look out for them.

“We have to be more responsible,” he said. “We have to be more in tune with what our children are doing not only online but on the cell phone. We have to be more vigilant in seeing what our children are doing online and on the computer and any other electronic or digital device.”

Kowaleski said parents should do spot checks on their children’s phones and emails.

Gamm warned against “friending” people they’ve never met in social media such as Facebook and sharing personal information.

“Unless you physically know the warm body that you’re talking to, they don’t become your friend,” he said “If you don’t know them face to face, never personally met them, don’t friend them.”

Kowaleski said it harkens back to the old adage he remembers as a child, don’t talk to strangers.

“That’s never been truer than it is today,” he said.

ONLINE

The website netsmartz.org is an interactive, educational program of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that provides age-appropriate resources to help teach children how to be safer online and offline. The program is designed for children ages 5-17, parents and guardians, educators and law enforcement, with resources such as videos, games, activity cards and presentations.

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