Pedophiles are using a livestreaming app to lure underage girls into performing sex acts and distributing the explicit material of the girls as child pornography, according to a report.
KTTV reported that the pedophiles are using Live.Me, a popular Chinese livestreaming app, to feature streams of girls as young as seven or eight years old being manipulated into performing sex acts online.
The terms and conditions on Live.Me’s website state that children under the age of 13 are prohibited from using the app.
But KTTV investigated dozens of live streams posted on the website and found many of them featured underage girls.
One stream depicted an underage girl singing. When one viewer warned the girl in the comments to be wary of pedophiles, the pedophiles showed up in the video seconds later. Other girls took off their clothes at their viewers’ request.
Dr. Lisa Strohman, a practicing clinical psychologist and former FBI agent, called the site “a prostitution platform” for young women.
“I did homicidal pedophilia at the bureau, so I’ve seen a lot of really terrible things, but this terrifies me,” Dr. Strohman said. “For me, it’s like a prostitution platform, or turning into one.”
“It’s very clear these girls are creating sexualized dances in order to elicit a response,” she added. “They wanna get prices from people that they can turn into money.”
Chris Pavan, a computer forensics expert, told KTTV that other pedophiles not in the videos are also exploiting these young girls.
“The screen captures are being recorded to their computers,” Pavan said. “They’ll edit it down; they’ll generate something that is viewable by pretty much anybody’s computer, and then they upload it to a file-sharing site where an individual who wants to consume it can download it and has to pay some money for that file.”
Live.Me is not the only website where pedophiles prey on young children. Pedophiles are also using more mainstream social networking apps such as Snapchat to exploit minors for sex.