Last year a 13-year-old Illinois boy learned an old, painful lesson about online relationships. After swapping messages with someone who claimed to be a 19-year-old woman in search of nude photos, he eventually sent an indecent video of himself. When he had second thoughts and tried to break off contact, “she” threatened to post the video publicly. He told his parents instead, and they called the police. The culprit turned out to be a 24-year-old man in California who had used similar “sextortion” tactics to exploit five other boys.

While pedophiles have been taking advantage of kids online for about as long as there’s been an internet, law enforcement officials say tactics employed by the 24-year-old Californian are becoming more common in at least one way: He found the 13-year-old on Snapchat, which he told police had become his preferred venue for obtaining child porn. Read more…