ATLANTA — Several local schools are warning parents about a suspected predator contacting young girls on social media.
Investigators said the predator ran an Instagram page to follow middle school girls and started messaging them.
Channel 2 Action News confirmed the suspected predator contacted students at Westminster and Sutton Middle School and may have exchanged explicit pictures and direct messages.
Marsha Sims has three middle school students and got an email alert from another parent this week about a predator targeting children.
“I immediately went, ‘Oh my gosh. Please don’t let my kids be anywhere near these accounts,'” she said.
Sims said she checked the followers and the following of the handle listed in the warning and didn’t find her kids.
“There were definitely children and names that I recognized that I was just horrified,” she said.
The FBI said the problem with these cases is how many there are.
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“They’re not difficult to track. The difficulty about these cases is how voluminous they are. There’s just so many bad guys online looking to talk to kids,” FBI Special Agent Keith Kabrhel said.
In order to help with investigations, Kabrhel warned parents to resist the urge to immediately delete the conversations or pictures a predator may exchange with their child.
“That can cause us a problem, because as we go to see what the bad guy requested from the child, we don’t have that on the child’s phone or child’s devices,” he said.
Cybersafety expert Ben Halpert, with Savvy Cyber Kids, said predators use social media as an easy way to get to children.
“Every day you hear about a new social media program that’s coming out there. That’s where the predators are, because that’s where the kids are, and that’s what they want. They want access to our kids,” he said.
Halpert said even Instagram accounts set to private can still receive direct messages and follow requests. He said parents need to have a conversation with their children about social media.
“Parents can only control the piece where they can engage in conversation with their kids and make sure they’re having the conversations, so the kids, like in this instance, go to the parents and tell the parents so we can catch people like this,” Halpert said.
Kabrhel’s advice is to parents may be counterintuitive: “If a parent interrogates a child, oftentimes kids will lie. And if a child lies to their parents, they’re going to lie to law enforcement, which causes an evidentiary problem.
Atlanta police have a detective on the case.
Cox Media Group
