Victims and perpetrators of serious cybercrimes ‘younger than ever before’

Erik Olsson – Press Association

Perpetrators and victims of serious cybercrimes – including child sexual abuse and sexual extortion – are younger than ever before, the head of the National Crime Agency (NCA) has said.

NCA director Graeme Biggar said children are appearing in the agency’s casework at a “younger and younger” age, and in a wider range of offences, with some grooming victims as young as eight years old.

He said the NCA, which leads the UK’s response to cybercrime, dealt with a case involving eight-year-olds being groomed on a gaming site as recently as this week.

Speaking at a roundtable with representatives from the Five Eyes – an intelligence-gathering alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US – Mr Biggar said: “We speak a lot about the extent of child sexual abuse, how that happens online, and that is still massively important.

“But what’s also true when we talk around the table about the experience from all of our countries is that we are seeing more young people appearing in more, in a wider range of, crimes than we have had before.

“And often as victims, primarily as victims, but also as perpetrators, and this is a real concern for us.”

He said the agency arrested a 15-year-old a couple of weeks ago for attempting to import a firearm into the UK.

Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor, head of Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP), who also spoke at the roundtable, said he had seen an “alarming growth” in the number of child perpetrators.

He said children now accounted for one in every five arrests made by the CTP, which has seen a 300% jump from 10 years ago.

“I’m really worried about our young people, their vulnerability to radicalisation,” he said.

“In fact, they are now appearing in our case work and the last thing we want to be doing is exposing young people to that risk.

“We certainly don’t want them to be arrested.”

Terrorism

Mr Taylor said the force, which arrested 40 minors for terrorism-related offences last year, had investigated children as young as 12 and 13.

He also said 10-year-olds have been referred to the Prevent programme, which aims to identify people at risk of radicalisation.

“There are some really worrying statistics that it is incumbent on all of us, and these are not unique to the United Kingdom, but incumbent on all of us to do everything we can to tackle that,” he said.

The roundtable comes after the Government unveiled plans in June to ban social media for under-16s and issued an ultimatum to technology companies to stop children from sending or receiving explicit images.

Mr Biggar said the ban and ultimatum would “inevitably” result in fewer victims of child sexual exploitation as 91% of illegal images are taken by the child.

“I do think taking more of our children off social media at a younger age will absolutely help us in combating the arguments that we are trying to tell,” he said.

He said social media allows paedophiles to find and connect with “huge” numbers of children who then coerce them into sending nude images, though he also added there were “lots of benefits” to children being online.

Mr Biggar also warned it is has become easier for paedophiles to access child abuse material on the open web than the dark web, which he said had seen a fall in activity.

“That is partly because we have been successful in penetrating those groups and identifying the individuals and taking them down,” Mr Biggar said.

“It’s also because it is easier to do some of this activity on the open web without being identified, so that’s a real challenge for us, and in all of our investigations.

“The developments in technology have given scale, but they’ve also given anonymity, and that’s something that we need to work really hard on.”

Mr Taylor said children who are being recruited by foreign actors to be their criminal proxies in the UK are “quite naive” and often paid “very small amounts of money”.

Arson

It comes after two men were found guilty of conspiring to carry out arson attacks on a car and property connected to the Prime Minister after being recruited online by a Russian-speaking Telegram user called “El Money”.

“Some may not even know that they are being recruited to do this on behalf of foreign states,” he said.

“These are vulnerable individuals and our job is to prevent and divert them from this behaviour.

“We don’t want to be arresting them, obviously we will if we have to, and it means that we can keep the public at large safe, but we need to be doing everything we can to prevent them coming into the place in the first place.”