Chat Hour is a set of obscure chat rooms that exists on the large underbelly of the internet. It’s the kind of place that’s been largely untouched by the efforts towards heavy moderation that has become a somewhat controversial hallmark of the mainstream internet in recent years.
When you ask people about pedophiles on the internet, you’re likely to get rumours about the dark web from older, less tech savvy people. Among younger people, you might also reasonably expect to get stories about some of the weirder things to come out of YouTube Kids, or stories about their time on MySpace a decade ago, or maybe even anecdotes about apps like musical.ly, which is currently popular with kids.
But it’s hardly hyperbole to say that Chat Hour suffers from a lot of the same problems with pedophiles as other sites do. It may not be on the same kind of scale as some other places online, but there have been legitimate cases where pedophiles have been caught using the site for soliciting sex online.
Some of these cases have even found their way to the media, which is surprising given how obscure the site seems to be. Brian Cooper is a man from the U.K. who was sentenced to 20 months for engaging in sexual acts with girls aged in their early teens. Another man from the U.K., 55-year-old Malcolm Blout, was jailed after engaging in sexual conversation with an undercover policeman he believed to be a twelve-year-old girl. Neil Cooper from Wales avoided prison after he was caught soliciting sexual chats from what he believed to be a 12-year-old.
While all of this may make it sound like this is a problem exclusively for the United Kingdom, it isn’t. There have been publicised cases from the United States as well–19-year-old Samuel Townley from Luzerne, Pennsylvania, was sentenced after using the site to download child pornography. Another American, 29-year-old Jonathan Yates from Virginia, was convicted for sending nude pictures to a 16-year-old he met on the site.
If you happened to have clicked those links, one thing you may have noticed is that none of these journalists were able to work out the connection between the cases: they all used Chat Hour as a way to either commit their crimes, or as a way to meet people they’d commit crimes against. This is forgivable however, due to these cases all happening far away from each other.
The fact that these people all used the site is no accident. The general rule of thumb among many users is that at least half the users are catfish, and many users seem to have extreme or taboo fetishes. Consider this transcript of a chat one Redditor provided in a thread they created on r/CreepyPMs:
BLACK: Hello gorgeous, is it bad or wrong that I’m laying here wearing my older gfs (37) dirty thong while stroking my cock with her 15 daughter’s panties and sniffing crotch of 13 daughter’s panties while looking at your sexy body?
BLUE: Yes.
BLACK: Why? Ever had any of your panties go missing
BLUE: Because incest and pedophelia, and anything approaching that territory, is immoral and disgusting. Source: am survivor of it.
BLACK: Survivor of what? And any panties go missing
BLUE: You know what? Fuck this noise. You’re being purposely clueless, so I’m screenshoting this, putting it on Reddit, and blocking you.
This isn’t the only time a Reddit user has provided screenshots or transcripts of things that have happened on ChatHour, either. Another user provided a couple of compilation posts of things said to them on the site. Here’s a link to the first, and a link to the second.
While neither of these compilations explicitly contain pedophilic material, I think they show the kind of culture the site has. It’s the kind where asking women and girls sexual questions is considered to be a normal, and arguably even accepted thing. Much like any other part of the internet, it’s the kind of place where a person might expect to be asked vulgar, uncomfortable questions.
However, due to a nearly complete lack of effective moderation, it’s also the kind of place where pedophiles might be able to find victims, or other adults willing to indulge them in their fantasies.
There’s anecdotal evidence for this as well, found in some of the reviews of the site on Site Jabber. One reviewer using the name Gary R. had this to say about the site:
I’m divorced and got my 12 year old sons tablet this morning found messages between him and a boy who my guess is around 17. Probably a child molester.
Another user named Sandy R. wrote:
My son visited a room about gaming. He was approached by a man who claimed to be 15. He immediately started flirting and sending sexually laced comments to my son, who was 9 at the time (he has a cousin who is 15, so he trusts that age). When my son said he seemed much older than 15, he said, “Oops! I must have transposed the numbers. I’m 51, but a kid at heart!” He offered to send pics of himself, “artistic” nudes.
I should point out in the case of this 51-year-old, he’s lying. No doubt Sandy R. was aware of this as well. When you sign up for an account, the site will ask you for your date of birth; not for you to simply type in your age. It’s therefore quite difficult to transpose your age on the site unless you legitimately have eyesight problems, or perhaps you click a year that’s one or two years before or after your actual year of birth.
Many of the reviews on Site Jabber go along similar lines–the site is mildly popular among pedophiles, and due to a lack of effective moderation, it’s not difficult for kids as young as ten or twelve to gain access to it. All you need is a valid email address and you can join.
While the site ostensibly requires you to be at least thirteen to join, there seems to be very little to prevent anyone younger from signing up. Given the often explicitly sexual tone of the conversations people have on there, I believe an argument can be made that this minimum age should be raised to eighteen.
It’s one thing for me to say this, but it’s quite another for it to be effective in reality. There seems to be very little interest in making sure such a restriction would work. There’s no effective moderation team, which has led to there being a seemingly excessive number of catfish. Many aren’t particularly good at it–they’ll use pictures of the “scene queens” who were popular in the late ’00s, or they’ll use pictures from photoshoots easily found via Google images, or of webcam models.
I must admit, there’s a part of me that’s not entirely surprised that Chat Hour hasn’t gotten a lot of attention as a place with an absurdly high number of pedophiles. The site is obscure enough that it’s not so uncommon for there to only be 500 or 600 people using the site’s mobile version at any given moment. Rarely does the number of people online seem to creep into the thousands.
However this doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. It’s a small one in the larger context of the internet, granted; but it’s one that should be dealt with. While there does seem to be officials in the United Kingdom who recognise this, hence the sting operation which was responsible for catching Malcolm Blout, it’d be nice if police from other countries would follow suit.
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