A senior officer at the National Crime Agency has warned that a plan by Facebook to encrypt messages will give paedophiles more opportunity to abuse children on the site.
News of the move by the social media giant came after paedophile David Wilson was jailed for 25 years on Wednesday for posing as a girl on Facebook to get young boys to send him indecent images of themselves and other children.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Rob Jones, director of threat leadership at the NCA, said: “Our assessed intelligence picture is that there are 300,000 individuals in the UK that pose a sexual threat to children.
“In 2019, 69 million images and videos were referred to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children by industry.”
He continued: “In 2019, in the UK alone, over 86,000 referrals were made by companies like Facebook and up to June 2020 we had arrested 4,500 individuals in the UK with national policing and safeguarded 6,000 children.
“We have been put on notice by Facebook that the type of referral that gave us the insight to arrest (David) Wilson would no longer be available to us because they will be unable to see their own content and illegal behaviour on their platform.”
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