Online Offences
What Are Online Offences?
Online offences involve the use of a ‘carriage service’ (the internet or mobile phone for example) to commit criminal offences. While online offences cover financial and malicious behaviour, the most common online offences I find clients charged with relate to child exploitation material.
High Tech Crimes
This covers ‘hacking’ and similar malicious online behaviour, including:
- Computer intrusions
- Unauthorised modification or destruction of data
- Creating and / or distributing malicious software (viruses)
- Online Child Sex Offences
This can be broken down into:
- Accessing
- Possession
- Distribution
- Grooming
Online Offence Material
It is an offence to possess material which depicts a child in a sexual situation. For the purposes of this legislation a child is a person under the age of 18 years. The material can be a photograph, video, printed or written. The images can be real, avatars or cartoons.
Most people charged with possession of child pornography have downloaded it from an internet site or obtained it via file sharing software. The police are able to easily detect those who visit such internet sites through their credit card details if purchased or through the IP address of the computer which visited the site.
Some accused send child pornography to others. This is a very serious offending of transmitting/distribution. This including ‘sexting’ (sending explicit images via text) where the subject is a child under 18.