Parents urged to be alert to online grooming after offender used fake profiles to target girls

A Metropolitan Police investigation by the Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation team led to the sentencing of a convicted child sex offender to 25 years plus an 8-year extended licence period on November 5, 2026, after detectives uncovered 12 additional victims hidden within hundreds of gigabytes of digital evidence seized from two mobile phones. The offender used fake social media profiles to target girls under 18, with some victims as young as 14, demonstrating the sustained digital forensic work required to identify every victim across multiple encrypted channels and hidden accounts.

Detection systems operating at the point of first contact could intercept grooming advances before a pattern becomes entrenched. Guardii's anti-grooming detection module, developed by a Meta Business Partner, identifies coercion, escalation and sustained targeting across children's direct messages on Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms in real time. Rather than waiting for a child to report or for law enforcement to forensically reconstruct months of offending from seized devices, the technology surfaces hostile contact before it reaches the target, flags the shape and seriousness of a conversation to a parent or safeguarding professional without exposing message content, and enables rapid escalation to the appropriate authority while the child is still at risk.