A children's rights group in the Netherlands managed to indentify over 1,000 pedophiles worldwide with the help of a 10-year-old computer-generated girl they called "Sweetie."
Activists from Terre des Hommes performed an Internet sting operation from a warehouse office in an Amsterdam industrial park, according to the Associated Press.
A rise in online child sex tourism led the group's director of projects, Has Guyt, to conduct the probe, which produced shocking results.
"If we don't intervene soon, this sinister phenomenon will totally run out of control," Guyt told AP.
Using a 3D digital display, members of TDH constructed Sweetie - a female meant to resemble a Filipina child - and put her into online chat rooms. Over the next 10 weeks, 20,000 predators approached Sweetie, asking her to perform sexual acts on video.
"They were ready to pay Sweetie for sexual acts in front of her webcam," head of the group Albert Jaap van Santbrink told reporters at The Hague.
"All we had to do was enter a chat room, post the details of a prepubescent girl, and within 30 seconds, we had ten people wanting to talk to us," one researcher who went by Peter, said. "After five minutes, we had 100. These people have zero-risk perception. They feel the Internet is a lawless place."
While the pedophiles chatted with Sweetie, researchers used basic research techniques to find information about them. They've since turned the material over to Interpol.
The growing trend of exploiting children for sex online has already claimed tens of thousands of victims in the Philippines alone, Gulf News reported. People - usually men from wealthy Western countries - pay children from poor countries to perform online sex shows. Pedophiles don't need to even leave their houses to find victims - they can engage online instead.
Some children are reportedly forced by their parents to participate in such acts to earn money for the family.
"It's still not too late," Guyt told AP. "Our worst scenario is that the same thing will happen with this as has happened with child pornography-that is now a multibillion dollar industry in the hands of criminal gangs."
Many child prostitutes are paid through online money transfer services. Some perform weekly webcam acts in private chat rooms.
Three perpetrators identified by TDH were of Irish nationality and living in Ireland. Two of them have their own children. 110 were Brits, while others were from the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Turkey and Italy.
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