Missing kids

WiredSafety does not handle missing children cases. If you have a missing child, you should contact your local law enforcement agency.

If you are in the United States, after contacting your local law enforcement agency contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-thelost or www.cybertipline.com. Do not touch the computer until knowledgeable law enforcement help arrives

What to do if your child is missing and you suspect a cyberpredator is involved

We hope you’ll never need to use the information in this section. But sometimes horrible things can happen, and knowing what to do, and what not to do, and having a community response plan in place can make the difference between a child’s being returned safely or not.

• Don’t panic. I know that’s next to impossible, but you need to be thinking clearly to be able to help law enforcement. Don’t touch the computer or let anyone else touch it. This is not a time for your neighbor who is a computer expert to be fiddling around with your computer trying to find evidence. That should be left to the professionals.
• Call your local law-enforcement agency first. They know your community best and are located right where you need them. Don’t let them touch your computer, however, unless they have a cybercrime team.
• Pull together the information they will need. Gather recent photos of your child and make sure that someone is talking to your child’s friends to see if they have any information about the abduction. Make sure you have the e-mail account passwords available, and information about which ISP and e-mail service you use. If your child has an e-mail account with the school, gather that information as well. Does your child have an ICQ account? If so, make sure you have the ICQ number and their ICQ password. Do you use filtering or monitoring products? Find the manual, and make sure you have your passwords accessible.
• Call the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children or the FBI. The National Center can be found at 1-800-THE-LOST, and you can get the number for your local field office of the FBI from the phone book. You can also find it, in advance, online at www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm.

Fast methods are available to law enforcement to obtain information from the ISPs. They also have very good working relationships with the Internet service providers, since many of their security officers worked for the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies before joining the private sector.

Sophisticated cybercrime teams can find almost anything online these days.

The Community Response

Debbie Mahoney, founder of SOC-UM (www.soc-um.org), is deeply involved in missing-children issues. She developed a guide for creating an Effective Readiness Plan (ERP) after having worked with the community of Lodi, California, in helping find a child who had been kidnapped in 1994. Although the child was not abducted by a cyberpredator, this guide works equally well should that happen. Debbie credits the community’s enthusiastic response with the safe return of the child. Make sure that if something horrible happens in your community everyone will respond as enthusiastically. And make sure your community is prepared.

Every community and school system should have an ERP. Typically, a task force is appointed by the city management working in coordination with local law enforcement. When Internet issues are involved, it’s important that a cyber–law-enforcement agency be involved as well, even if that means contacting and coordinating with the state or federal law-enforcement agencies. Debbie advises that the task force that designs the ERP consider the following:

• stationing a police liaison in the volunteer center
• securing space for the volunteer center
• having city and county maps available at the volunteer center
• making arrangements with the local phone companies to provide phones in the volunteer location immediately
• making arrangements to copy and distribute flyers as soon as information is obtained

We’ve added a few additional suggestions for when a cyberluring or abduction is involved, or the Internet is involved somehow:

• Local law enforcement should make sure that the emergency contact numbers for the major ISPs and online services are gathered in advance. They don’t want to find out that they can’t reach someone in the security department over a holiday or weekend, or that they have to work their way through voicemail mazes.
• Law enforcement should compile a list of the major filtering software companies and their security department contact information. If the parents used a filtering product, the product’s security and tech people might be able to help access information that is otherwise unavailable.
• Last but not least, the tech-support or systems manager and library media specialist from the school system should be contacted to brief law enforcement about their systems and what information is available to them. Does the school use a filtering product? If so, what reports are available on surfing practices? E-mail and ICQs? What about web sites authored by the students—what information is available about them?

Preparing in advance makes all the difference in the world. Time is the most important element in finding a missing child and capturing the perpetrator, or, in a case such as the Littleton tragedy, when you are trying to gather information about a student’s web site. Therefore, it is essential to have plans designed to produce those results. (You can find more information on ERPs at the If you are in the United States, after contacting your local law enforcement agency contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-thelost or www.cybertipline.com. Do not touch the computer until knowledgeable law enforcement help arrives.