Dedicated unit to tackle web paedophiles

The government has launched the first permanently staffed unit to track down paedophiles operating online.

The agency, which will be known as the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre, will be charged with tackling child sex offenders and will be headed by Jim Gamble, former deputy director general of the National Crime Squad.

Among the new facilities housed by the unit will be a 24-hour resource to report online child abuse images and systems to track paedophiles across the world.

The Ceop centre will also start discussions with the technology industry on how to build child protection features into new hardware and will provide education materials for children to help them avoid becoming victims of paedophiles using the internet.

Officers from the centre will pose as children online in order to catch such paedophiles, while investigations by the centre will also tackle the financial side of child sex crime by attempting to capture the credit card details of offenders and seize assets of those who distribute illegal material.

According to the government, the initiative has received backing from companies including AOL and Microsoft.