Police investigate dating website for explicit underage photos

A UK-BASED dating website which features explicit photographs of apparently underage girls was being investigated by police yesterday.

Girls who claim they are just 15 years old are seemingly publicising themselves with explicit photographs on a popular internet service.

Older teenagers appear to be using the website to offer pornographic shots in exchange for mobile phone top-ups and other gifts.

The Faceparty website, which is one of the UK’s largest, is designed to allow its 2.4 million members to swap messages and meet new people.

Children as young as 13 are using the site, which experts fear could be used by paedophiles to hunt potential targets.

Faceparty banned the apparently underage members and removed their pictures within 90 minutes of being alerted to their appearance, and a spokesman said programmers were working out new ways of keeping children off the site.

"All images submitted are filtered prior to them being uploaded," said a statement from the company’s solicitor.

The statement said all members sign up to conditions which warn they should not download obscene material, including "any naked photographs where the model is, or appears to be, under the age of 18". In one member profile, a user calling herself Linda from North Wales described herself as a lesbian and gave her age as 23, but later admitted: "I am 15 really."

Her entry, before its deletion, included five nude photographs.

The website does not allow any members to list their ages as under 16, so any children using the site would have to say they are over the age of consent.

A spokesman for the police National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which investigates child-porn cases, said: "Looking at these pictures, I would say the girls are probably in the 14 to 15 age bracket.

"There is also the issue of whether they have been posted by themselves, or whether they are subject to abuse.

"The website has a responsibility to take down these pictures, without question.

"A child of this age cannot consent to the publication of this sort of material. By publishing them, the website is making and distributing indecent images of children, which is an offence."

The police spokesman said it was "physically impossible" for sites with such large databases to monitor all the information.

Officers will now liaise with Faceparty to see the material is removed and measures put in place to prevent more child porn being posted on the site, he said.

"If they are acting in a responsible manner, then a prosecution probably would not be in the public interest," he said.