An actress posing as a 14-year-old girl for a TV documentary was subjected to live-streamed sex acts and demands within a minutes of going on a chat website popular with children and teens.
In a sequence bound to horrify parents, one act was so explicit that it left documentary maker Todd Sampson recoiling in horror.
‘Oh my God! Oh my God! That is disgusting!’ he exclaimed trying to shield his eyes from what the other user was doing.
Sampson, 52, said not only couldn’t he show the act on his documentary Mirror, Mirror, he refused to even describe it because it was so confronting.
The shocking incident occurred on chat website Omegle, which boasts that it lets you ‘talk to strangers’, by randomly connecting user webcams feeds with each other.
Omegle as Sampson discovered is well-known among children and teens and pulls in millions of users around the globe every week, despite the fact he had never heard of it.
An actress posing as a 14-year-old girl (pictured) for a TV documentary was subjected to live-streamed sex acts and demands within a minutes of going on a website popular with children.
As an experiment, conducted under the supervision of former WA police officer and child cybersafety expert Paul Litherland, Sampson recruited 19-year-old actress ‘Ella’ to play a 14-year-old while on the platform.
Ella’s was the face that appeared on the webcam feed but only Sampson and Litherland could see the other user and type messages.
As ‘Ella’ logged on a bearded man instantly appeared as her first ‘stranger’ connection.
He make lewd licking motions with his tongue and asked Ella to ‘show her feet’.
When Sampson replied as ‘Ella’ saying she had shoes on the man disconnected.
Sampson then connected with another man who demanded a ‘boobs show’.
When Sampson replied ‘you first’ the man lifted his shirt to show a nipple.
Documentary maker Todd Sampson was left recoiling in disgust after staging the experiment
Sampson was also shocked to discover that his teenage girls had been using Omegle ‘for years’
‘How old are you?’ Sampson typed.
’24’ was the reply.
‘I’m 14,’ Sampson wrote.
The man resumed demanding that Ella lift up her shirt.
‘Mum’s downstairs,’ Sampson typed.
‘Sorry I’m not going to show – too scared.’
Almost immediately after, the man displayed the sex act that left Sampson reeling.
‘Oh Jesus!’ Sampson exclaimed. ‘That’s scarring.’
The man kept badgering Ella to expose herself and Sampson disconnected, saying he ‘felt sick’.
Mr Litherland said such interactions were typical of Omegle.
‘As a copper you want to reach down the screen and grab this guy and say ‘Look, does your wife know you are doing this?’,’ he said.
‘Do your kids know you are doing this? It’s a 14-year-old girl’.’
‘Now you imagine a 10-year-old kid or a 12-year-old kid who stumbled across that site and that’s what they are saying.’
Sampson tried one more connection and three young girls come up on the screen.
Alarmed, Sampson asks what they doing on the site.
The girls say they are bored and the one who appears to be the oldest points to the youngest one: ‘Also she wanted to see some scary penises’.
New series: Todd Sampson (pictured) is back with a new project, titled love + hate. The upcoming documentary will delve into ‘how the internet has polarised society
Sampson got a shock when he went home and warned his own two teenage girls about Omegle, telling them not to go on it.
He said his daughters looked at the ground, until one of them admitted: ‘Dad, we’ve been on that site for years. Everyone’s on it at school.’
‘I’m not proud of that but at least now I know and can talk to them about it,’ Sampson said.
Mr Litherland said Omegle and the danger it posed to vulnerable children was the reason he left the WA police force to because there were so many vulnerable kids being exposed to predatory behaviour online.
‘That’s one of the hardest things to deal with as a dad and educator because you can’t help them,’ he said.
Sampson, a former advertising executive who gained fame as a regular panelist on ABC show The Gruen Transfer, said the two-part Mirror, Mirror documentary shows how the internet is ‘changing our kids, our attitudes and our minds’.
The theme of the first episode was ‘love’, while he second part, which Sampson says will be even more ‘full-on’, is based around ‘hate’.
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