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Online chat rooms - many of you may not understand them or want to deal with them. The fact is - they put your children in danger. Their popularity is at an all time high, and so is the number of sexual predators who use them to prowl for children. This is one of those stories you set out to research in hopes of finding nothing. What we did find is staggering. Child predators no longer just lurk from the park bench at the playground. They are now scouring the virtual playground on the web.
"A lot of girls are vulnerable to talking to whoever," says Hoover Sophomore Jiji Thomas.
Hoover School Resource Officer Dale Harden says, "It causes a lot of danger for the students, that the students don't realize."
"This is what they live for," says an undercover cyber-crime special agent with the Birmingham office of the FBI (web) .
It's a weekday afternoon. An FBI agent is online posing as a 14 year-old girl from Alabama. In minutes...he's hit on by several grown men.
"I usually don't say anything and just let them go to my profile," says the agent.
The agent is surfing in an America Online (web|news|quote) chat room called Father's Chatting, but the intent is certainly not fatherly.
"Obviously it's a predatorial chat room," says the agent.
Often times the conversations start casually, but quickly become personal.
The agent says, "He goes from hey if you aren't busy would you like to chat, to how's your day going, pleased to meet you, what can I call you, now he's down to what turns you on?"
One chatter, who claims to be a 55 year-old man, has no problem telling the agent he wants to put his hand between between the agent's legs. Keep in mind he thinks he's chatting with a teenage girl. Another 19 year-old asks the agent to describe her underwear.
"These rooms...this is what they are looking for," says the agent.
Perhaps, the most shocking is a 39 year-old who claims to have a 16 year-old daughter of his own, doesn't hold back a bit. He fires off a message so graphic, it would blow your mind. He mentions wanting to spank the agent and have rough sex. Remember, this is a 39 year-old man, talking to a person he thinks is a 14 year old girl.
"They're just not wired right. The key word is predator. They're predators - they're seeking children," says the agent.
Some online predators are looking for cyber-sex, others for phone sex. Then there are the ones who will stop at nothing to meet their prey face to face. It's not uncommon for predators to board a plane and travel the distance, thinking they're less likely to get caught.
"I've talked to them as far away as California and as close as just across town," says the agent.
"Anything on the computer can be tracked. Anything," says Harden.
Harden has seen it all. He even has his own MySpace page to keep an eye on his students and serve as a venue to allow students to speak with him in confidence.
"Female students tell me they've had someone they don't know ask them to send them a nude photo," Harden says.
Hoover High Sophomore Jiji Thomas was online when she was only an eighth grader. She thought she was talking to a 14 year-old boy in Hoover, but it was really someone else.
"Finally after five or six tries of him trying to accept me I accepted him as a friend. He sent me a message trying to meet me and do that and see if he could actually pull the kids in," says Thomas.
Find out who she fell for, what happened, and how you can learn from her story, in part two of our special report Friday night at ten.
ABC 33/40 News to leave comments on news stories.