This is really scary.
A Cork mum has warned parents to be vigilant after her child and his friends were sent explicit messages, images and videos via a smartphone app.
The mother, whose twelve-year-old son was chatting with his friends on the app ooVoo when he was targeted, spoke to Neil Prenderville on Cork’s Red Fm to share the alarming details of what happened.
According to the Irish Examiner, she told Neil that a man was naked and making explicit gestures in a video call with her son and his friends.
Explaining the app, she said: “They can have a group chat where there are five or six of them on the same phone call, they can see each other and they can text each other.
“It’s their way of communicating without using their phone credit.”
However, things soon took a dark turn.
“One of the other children’s mothers rang me to tell me what her daughter was after telling her, that when they were in their group chat this man came into it with them.
“He was completely naked, he was around 50 or 60, what he was doing to himself you couldn’t even repeat it on air.
“The kids were kind of shook up by it.
“From what the kids have told us he doesn’t talk, so when he’s saying things he types it up.
“He typed up that he was French, living in France, and he was telling the kids to put masks on their faces and to do to themselves what he was doing to himself.”
The woman said that even after she intervened, the man still managed to get access to the children’s conversation:
“The scariest part is that when I asked my child about it, he told me exactly what was happening, so I got a new SIM card for his phone thinking that it might have been linked to the phone number.
“I blocked him from the app and yet, when the child was on the app that evening, he still managed to come into a phonecall the child was on.
“He [her son] came into me and he said ‘Mam I thought you blocked him from my phone, how is he on my phone again?’
“So even after I blocked him through the app he was still able to get back into their phones.”
The woman added that the children have been warned not to mention any plans on the app and urges other parents to monitor their children’s use of ooVoo following the concerning incident.
