That is terrible Star. I hope the authorities can trace this one. Just horrible.
www.edmontonsun.com/News/Canada/2005/10/17/1265890-sun.htmlTORONTO -- Graphic photographs of the rape of a young girl were embedded in a spammed e-mail sent across Canada this past weekend - just the latest in an increasingly aggressive campaign by online marketers of child porn.
At least 10 complaints about the unsolicited e-mail were called in over the weekend to Cybertip.ca, a national reporting centre based in Winnipeg.
Anyone with an e-mail account can accidentally stumble upon horrific scenes of child abuse, said Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police sex crimes unit.
"How do you ever erase that image or explain to a child exactly what's going on?" he said.
"For a lot of children, their first experience with sexuality will be something they have inadvertently tripped across on the Internet."
When opened, the e-mail - which has no subject line and generates a false name for the sender - automatically uploads a collage of images showing the sexual assault by an adult male of a terrified-looking prepubescent girl. Across the image are the words "CP COMPANY."
The image links to a now-defunct website that was shut down several weeks ago after the spam first surfaced in Canada, said Signy Arnason, director of Cybertip.ca.
Arnason said it's the latest example of a disturbing new trend in which online marketers are "getting more and more aggressive" by sneaking images of child pornography into innocuous-looking e-mails so they can't be avoided when opened.
While traditional spam involves text links to pornographic websites that must be actively pursued by the e-mail recipient, spammers are "becoming more in your face whereby they're actually sticking an image of a child being exploited right in the e-mail," she said.
About half of all child pornography complaints received by Cybertip.ca is related to e-mail spam. Toronto Police get about 20 to 30 similar complaints a week.
"This is a nightmare for us," Gillespie said of the difficulty in tracing such spam back to its creators. "By the time you mine down as far as you can, it often has roots in eastern Europe, which can lead back to the United States. It takes a great deal of expertise and a tremendous amount of expense."
Gillespie said people who receive child porn spam should delete it and report the incident to Cybertip.ca, a not-for-profit agency endorsed by the federal government and police services across the country.
Although it's illegal in Canada to access child pornography, police would never prosecute someone who accidentally viewed an unsolicited image, e-mail or website, Gillespie said.
"Common sense has to prevail," he said. "A lot of people worry, 'Oh God, I have this one picture on my browser and I'm going to be arrested by the police.' The short answer is no. We only go after pedophiles."
Arnason said the online community is becoming increasingly vigilant about reporting child abuse and porn to Cybertip.ca.
"Law enforcement can't tackle this issue alone. We know people are coming across this content online, so they come to us
