Children Are "Weaponized" Through Online Games To Commit Murder, Europol Claims
By Levi Winslow
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By Levi Winslow
Europe's law enforcement agency is taking a closer look at online multiplayer games and gaming-adjacent platforms as the fears that criminals could be grooming, manipulating, and weaponizing children to commit violent crimes rise sharply in European society.
Europol (or the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation) partnered with eight countries to identify and remove thousands of incidents of hateful rhetoric shared on gaming and gaming-related platforms. Conducted on November 13 and in partnership with Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, Europol's Referral Action Day program reportedly uncovered around 5,408 links to jihadist content, 1,070 links to violent right-wing extremist and terrorist content, and 105 links to racist and xenophobic content on a variety of unnamed gaming platforms.
Europol's executive director, Catherine De Bolle, spoke to Politico on November 21 about her fears following the findings by that joint committee dubbed the European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). De Bolle said that, through these gaming platforms, criminal networks are recruiting children to engage in torture and murder.
"The weaponization of children for organized crime groups is what is going on at the moment on European soil," she said. "They weaponize the children to torture or to kill. It's not about petty theft anymore. It's about big crimes. [In one] worst-case, [we've seen a young boy who was ordered] to kill his younger sister, which happened. It’s cruel; we have never seen this before."
Europol discovered that criminals start grooming children by first joining their online multiplayer chats to talk about innocuous topics like family and pets. These public chats then move to more private servers where children are convinced to share sensitive data, such as family names and home addresses. With this knowledge, criminals could bribe or blackmail children into harming their families or themselves.
The Referral Action Day program uncovered all kinds of dangerous and violent content after combing through copious gaming and streaming platforms. According to the EU IRU's findings, criminals would re-enact terrorist attacks, executions, or school shootings in a game, edit videos with chants or suggestive emojis, and then share them on many commonly used social media platforms.
Europol claimed there have been at least 105 instances, including 10 contract killings, where violent crimes were "performed as a service" by children. Sometimes, the children were offered as much as $20,000 to commit the act, though Europol said not every child received their payment. If a child, viewed as a kind of remote-operated weapon, doesn't commit the act, then the criminals will shock them with horror as a reminder of what's owed.
"We also have children who do not execute the order and then, for instance, [the criminals] kill the pet of the child, so that the child knows very well, 'We know where you live, we know who you are, you will obey, and if you don't, we will go even further to kill your mother or your father,'" De Bolle explained. "Parents blame themselves in a lot of cases. They do not understand how it is possible. The problem is you don’t have access to everything your child does and you respect also the privacy of your children. But as a parent, you need to talk about the dangers of the internet."
Whether the child is bullied at school, has psychological problems, or is healthy and happy, De Bolle said no minor is safe. Criminals even go as far as extending the nature of the crime, from domestic violence to information spying for a hybrid war by state actors.
"You also have it with hybrid threat actors that are looking for the crime as a service model--the young perpetrators to listen to the foreign state, to listen to the communication around buildings," De Bolle said.
Though not specifically cited by Europol and the EU IRU, the game creation platform Roblox has raised alarms for parents and politicians over the years regarding children's safety concerns. The platform, which has a player base that's mostly under the age of 13, has been at the center of a handful of recent lawsuits over child exploitation and grooming. States like Florida and Texas are suing developer Roblox Corporation for failing to protect kids. Roblox Corporation has announced a new face-scanning initiative to verify the ages of its users and prevent minors from talking to adults, but a California lawmaker believes the developer should continue to "do more" to ensure the safety of the minors who play the game.
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