Warning kids to not take candy from a stranger made sense 50 years ago, and it’s still what makes sense today. The very concept is the fundamental piece of “grooming,” which is loosely defined as when someone builds a relationship, trust and emotional connection with a child or young person so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them. I realize this sounds a world apart from offering candy to a little kid with the intention of grabbing them, but it’s actually the same magic trick.

The candy scam required three things: access, a piece of candy, and a creepy van to get the kids in. Let’s break these down. Access means that predators had to physically get around your kid. It could be in a park, a grocery store, wherever. The candy was exactly that: something sweet that the kid wanted. The creepy van is just a way to remove the child from the parent’s protection. The online grooming process uses these exact same things.

ACCESS

Accessing children online is one of the easiest things to do. You can go to any social media app, make a profile, and start striking up conversations with random people immediately. It actually couldn’t be easier. Now this doesn’t mean that you will have physical access to them right away, but in this case “access” literally means can you speak with a child? That’s the entry point just like someone at the park or at the store would have to be able to come up and communicate with a victim.

THE CANDY

This is where online grooming differs from in person candy scams. The things that kids want are usually not physical items, though the promise of custom apparel from a certain company of financial sponsorships are definitely part of some scams. For the bargain basement grooming, we’ll focus on a few key lures: companionship, physical intimacy, and emotional connection. These function as the “candy” in these scams, and they don’t require physical access to exchange. The predator might reach out to someone and say something like, “I struggle making friends and you seem like such a nice guy/gal,” or, “my dog just died and I’m so sad and you are so easy to talk to,” or, “you seem so much more mature than other guys/gals, and I never have very good luck.” These are all different variations of offering companionship, intimacy, and emotional connection. You can really say anything, but you just need to get something out there that the teen wants, and that’s when you can start behavior modification.

Once the candy is being hung in front of the child, you start asking them for something. It could be something small, like let me see a picture of your new shoes. If the candy for the child is praise, you reward the picture with incredible enthusiasm and accolades. If the candy for the child is emotional connection, you reward the picture with something emotionally supercharged, (my sister who died used to have those shoes). So on and so forth. Once the first step is taken, you go for another, and another, and another, until you have the child behaving and readily accepting rewards you’re offering. This leads you to the last and worst phase: the creepy van.

THE VAN

The creepy van in the real world is a way to get the child away from the parents. Obviously, you can’t abuse someone in plain sight of his/her guardian or other adults in general. This is where things get tricky with online grooming. If the predator is a stranger and wants physical contact, the predator has to get the kids out of the house and away from parents. This leads to sneaking out of the house to meet the creep, and although that may seem like a crazy step for a young person to take, you have to remember that the grooming process could have been going on for months without parents knowing anything. If the predator doesn’t want to physically meet but instead wants something like nude photos or videos, he has to get the victim to migrate to a predator friendly app, like SnapChat. The reason some apps are more predator friendly than others is some, like SnapChat, delete interactions with end to end encryption. If someone sends a naked photo to someone in Instagram, at the time of writing this, Instagram would not automatically delete the photo. If the sender feels bad about it, he/she could contact the police and the police would have evidence. If the same thing happened on SnapChat, that app actually deletes the message, so if the sender again contacts the police, there is no evidence of what was sent. This is the same as getting the kids out of the house or into the creepy van. No one can see what happens or happened on these predator friendly apps. Once the migration to the new, terrible app happens, the creep continues the grooming orders to get whatever it is he wants.

THE SAME SCAM

This style of behavior modification is the same as it always has been. There are things kids want, and adults know this. They want to be better at sports. They want emotional connection. They want social approval. It’s not hard to pick one thing that teens and young people want and run an online scam using it, so the old adage is as valuable as it used to be: don’t take candy from strangers. We can’t let our children think that developing some random online relationship is somehow unique or different than taking something from a stranger. It’s not. It’s just like taking a jolly rancher from a complete stranger and getting in a creepy van, and remember, everyone online is a stranger. If they’re offering you something, you should not take it.