Friday, June 15, 2007

Child Pornography

According to the E-Mail I received five times yesterday, all I needed to do was to send an SMS message to the UK number shown or, alternatively, to call another UK number and I would gain access to PURE CHILD PORNO site.
Full of righteous indignation, I abandoned the urgent project on which I was working, to alert the authorities. Here, I reasoned, donning my deerstalker, was a simple piece of detective work. There had to be someone at either of those two numbers and all that would be needed to apprehend the culprits would be to trace those.
Not having access to any contacts for reporting this sort of thing, I turned to Google.
The first site that showed up was ASACP, a child protection agency, and they had a form to be completed. But my receiving an E-Mail with telephone numbers did not impress them. Rather stuffily, they said “We do not accept "spam" email reports, however, if the website address of the suspected child pornography site is contained in the email please report this to us. Issues regarding "spam" email in general should be addressed with your ISP (internet service provider).”
The sender of the E-Mails was using a Yahoo address so I checked their help site. Sure enough, they had a process for reporting “phishing” E-Mails or Spam – but nothing for reporting child pornographers. I did get a response – someone would get back to me within 48 hours.
Next I tried the Serious Organised Crime Agency, set up last year by Mr. Blair. It seemed totally disinterested in my problem. However, I did find the Internet Watch Foundation address on their site. They too had one of those handy-dandy forms to complete but, once again, only seemed interested if I had actually accessed a porno site. I completed it as best I could and shot it off to them. I'm waiting to hear.
In desperation, I sent a copy of the offending E-Mail to New Scotland Yard, where no doubt it is languishing under a pile of complaints concerning motoring offences. I've had no acknowledgement that it has been received, let alone looked at.
Somehow I can't help feeling that had I been reporting someone for driving in London without paying a congestion charge or loading their wheely bin with the wrong sort of items for recycling, the majesty of the law would have descended immediately upon them.
But it seems that Child Pornography is, well, just kid's stuff.
The full transcript of the E-Mail (one of them) was as follows:
“Send sms with code CP to +447894034180 or simply call +441638663732 and you gain access to PURE CHILD PORNO site.
If anyone knows who to report this too, I'd be much obliged.

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