The pleasures of Net surfing often come at a cost
THESSALONIKI – Recent cases of child pornography peddled over the Net are just the tip of the iceberg, representatives of the electronic crime squad and consumer organizations reckon. Only recently, a 72-year-old pensioner was arrested in Athens for posting video footage and photographs of minors as young as 2 being raped. Information on the Internet’s darker side was given at an event on February 8 by the Hellenic Consumer Organization (EKATO), which also presented the program SafeNetHome to mark the European Safe Surfing Week. «What we know as sex ads are the most innocuous activity on the Internet,» said T. Harisis, deputy police director of the newly established electronic crime squad. Fraud, sexual trafficking, human exploitation, and trafficking in pornographic material are all part of the Internet’s dark side, he pointed out. In the squad’s one month of operations at Thessaloniki security headquarters, he said, it had uncovered an international gang that defrauded people who wanted to buy cars over the Internet (and therefore more cheaply), to which two Thessaloniki residents had already fallen victim. EKATO’s president Tania Kyriakidi said that in Thessaloniki alone, there were two cases where Internet users lost the entire contents of their bank accounts, via credit card, when they naively believed they had won the Spanish lottery. Others have received e-mail from Nigerian fraudsters seeking assistance supposedly for extracting sums of money from their country. A survey carried out by EKATO amply illustrated ignorance of the dangers. Many schoolchildren who were asked whether they had visited web pages with pornographic content protested they had never visited such pages, only «sex» pages. The organization also referred to the case of two students from Pieria who had been forced to change schools due to threats by fellow pupils that they would have their photos, taken in the gym changing rooms, splashed all over the Internet if they did not hand over their pocket money. At the event, Alpha, a cyber helper, made its appearance. Aimed at protecting both adult and juvenile users, it is used as a seal to show that web pages in the program are safe for navigation. Forty-three percent of children who have visited web pages «for over-18s» say there are no rules for Internet use at home and 62 percent of parents are unaware that their children visit forbidden websites.
