Characterizing Pedophile Conversations on the Internet using Online Grooming

Abstract: Cyber-crime targeting children such as online pedophile activity are a major and a growing concern to society. A deep understanding of predatory chat conversations on the Internet has implications in designing effective solutions to automatically identify malicious conversations from regular conversations. We believe that a deeper understanding of the pedophile conversation can result in more sophisticated and robust surveillance systems than majority of the current systems relying only on shallow processing such as simple word-counting or key-word spotting. In this paper, we study pedophile conversations from the perspective of online grooming theory and perform a series of linguistic-based empirical analysis on several pedophile chat conversations to gain useful insights and patterns. We manually annotated 75 pedophile chat conversations with six stages of online grooming and test several hypothesis on it. The results of our experiments reveal that relationship forming is the most dominant online grooming stage in contrast to the sexual stage. We use a widely used word-counting program (LIWC) to create psycho-linguistic profiles for each of the six online grooming stages to discover interesting textual patterns useful to improve our understanding of the online pedophile phenomenon. Furthermore, we present empirical results that throw light on various aspects of a pedophile conversation such as probability of state transitions from one stage to another, distribution of a pedophile chat conversation across various online grooming stages and correlations between pre-defined word categories and online grooming stages.