Nottinghamshire parents are being warned about a smartphone app after a paedophile used it to send sexual pictures to local primary schoolchildren as young as nine.
Notts Police said the children were using the ooVoo app – a chat, video and picture service – and were befriended by the man who then sent them the images.
Officers say the victims were aged between nine and 11, and are not naming the school for legal reasons.
A force spokesman said: “One of the children told a teacher what had happened and it was reported to the police.
“Enquiries are on-going to identify who was responsible.
“Now, in the run up to Christmas we are asking parents to get involved in what children are doing online.”
Officers say they are concerned some parents may give mobile devices to children as presents, without thinking about online safety.
You need to know what your children are doing
Det Insp Pete Quinn said: “You need to know what your children are doing online.
“Don’t worry about intruding – that’s exactly what you should be doing.
“The most important thing to do is to talk to your kids about online relationships. Make sure you are creating a supportive home environment so that if anything suspicious or untoward happens, they will come to you.”
What to do: Advice for parents from Notts Police
- Set parental settings – they are designed to control what a child can view, not what they can send, so parents need to know the difference between these
- Alter privacy settings on apps – These will restrict who can see what your child is posting. What a child posts can be used by potential groomers to gather information on an intended victim so that they can pretend to have common interests
- More support is available at thinkyouknow.co.uk
Providing a free video and picture chat service, ooVoo has 100 million users worldwide, and has its head office in New York.
In a statement, a spokesman for the company told Notts TV News: “ooVoo is a closed network and we recommend you only accept friend requests from your friends, family and people you know and trust.
“We take security and privacy issues very seriously and have a chief privacy officer who extracts and deletes any accounts which may place children, or any ooVoo user at risk. ooVoo has a strict policy of users being 13 years of age and older.”
They added the firm has a security team which monitors its network to try to protect users.
