Father posts screenshots of sexual predator posing as nine-year-old

  • 22/08/2017
predator online
A father has published an online conversation between his daughter and a sexual predator. Photo credit: Getty

A father in the US has published screenshots sent online by a sexual predator to his seven-year-old daughter as a warning to other parents.

Last week, Brad Summer took to Facebook to post a series of distressing text messages between his seven-year-old daughter and a predator posing as a nine-year-old.

While many parents are vigilant about monitoring social media sites their children are on, in this case a predator used a lesser-known music app called musical.ly to contact the young girl. The app lets users film brief, shareable videos of themselves singing, dancing and lip-syncing.

In the screenshots, the user asks Mr Summer's daughter how old she is, before trying to elicit pictures from her.

After repeatedly asking her to send "pics without t-shirt", the young girl tells the person she can't because her mother told her not to.

But the predator persists, and demands she "make some pics without t-shirt now" and that "it's a secret between us only".

At this point, his daughter turned to her parents when her father intercepted the chat, and wrote "I am her father and I am a police officer. We have documented your IP address and locations. I recommend that you refrain from any other contact."

Sharing the conversation on Facebook, Mr Sumer asked that readers not judge their parenting, and that while knew he would receive some criticism, his daughter didn't have her own phone and was using what they thought was a safe app.

"I know many will blame us parents for this happening. But we never thought like predators and I guess we were naïve in thinking that our daughter was safe on what we thought was a kid friendly app," he wrote.

He said they never thought of someone pretending to be nine to gain access to their child.

As a parent, there are key things to be done to make sure children stay safe online, many of which can be found on netsafe.org.nz.

Newshub.