The Rise and Fall of Online Chat Rooms

Online chat rooms were a hotbed for adult predators pretending to be much younger than they were in order to have sexually charged conversations with unsuspecting teens. People could adopt an alias ensuring they were safe to interact online without fears of being identified in the real world. Yet this meant users were not always who they said they were. Mark perked up when a new user logged into the Manchester teen's chat room under the screen name Rachel West. He summoned the courage to initiate a private chat, discovering she was also a 16-year-old Manchester local. The pair struck up a conversation hoping to turn successful online interactions into real-world hookups.