SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4) - They can eradicate invading warriors from other galaxies but in the real world, teenaged boys are easy prey for middle aged men, sitting at their computers, looking for their next victims. What’s perhaps most disturbing is that parents are virtually opening the doors to their homes and inviting the stalkers in.
Fritzi Schreffler found out in a terrifying way, when she overheard a conversation between her sixteen year old son Steven and a fellow player in an on-line video game. “I’m turning sixteen in a couple days,” she heard her son say.
“He mentioned where his church is and his youth group is going to New Orleans next year,” Fritzi recounted. “He kept talking a little bit and all the sudden I turned around and said, ‘Stop talking!’"
A mother’s instincts told Fritzi something was wrong. She sensed a stranger at the other end of the Internet connection. She realized the person was asking personal questions. She recognized a child predator. She instructed her son to get out of the game, cut the connection, and turn off the machine.
This mother says she learned a lesson that day. "When anybody thinks about predators, they think of the Internet immediately. That's what you think of. You don't think of these games."
Neither had her teenaged son. “As soon as he asked me, ‘Where are you going to be?’ it clicked in my head,” said Steven. “I realized I probably shouldn't have said some of those things and that's when my parents intervened."
"You can't trust people anymore, unfortunately, and for me it just opened a whole other world for predators," said Steven, as if to warn his gaming buddies.
Utah law enforcers can’t repeat the warnings enough. Far too many parents, they say, are turning a blind eye to the dangers of on-line video games, where predators are showing up in droves, looking for teenaged victims, and where they are having far too much success.
"Parents who think, ‘My child would never leave the house and go meet somebody, they would never do that, are missing the boat because kids are doing it,” said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.
Utah’s top cop seems more alarmed by the number of out-of-touch parents than by the number of child predators. He says there are more of those diabolically skilled stalkers on-line than you would have guessed.
“Almost every time our investigators go gaming on-line, we find at least one within a few hours,” he says matter-of-factly.
Shurtleff formed the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force three years ago to seek out the predators stalking Utah’s children. With expert help from an unlikely source, his team of investigators has an impressive arrest record. Zach Loulias, then a fifteen year-old high school freshman, was recruited to train the entire task force team in the science of video gaming as well as the art of acting like a teenager. The specialized training has paid off.
"Our investigators, anytime they want can go on any one of these sights,” said Shurtleff, will start talking and pretend to be a child and these men will come and meet them by the end of the night.”
Difficult as it is to imagine, there are that many predators on-line on any given night, playing a dangerous game. Shurtleff leans forward in his chair and points at this reporter as he makes one more statement, his last word of this interview:
“When it comes to our children playing on the Internet, you never know the truth about who you’re talking to.”
