Boys and Girls in Venezuela Exploited Online

The article below is an English translation of an article originally published by the investigative journalism consortium Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (El CLIP). It is part of the “Innocence at Risk (Inocencia en Juego)” project, a collaboration between Tech Policy Press, Professor Lara Putnam, and El CLIP, which includes a series of independent reports coordinated by El CLIP and published in El CLIP, Chequeado, Crónica Uno, El Espectador, and Factchequeado.

Challenges proliferate on Facebook, with some users inviting children to share personal information, some with emojis or “suggestive” words that are used to offer or ask for explicit images.

“Pic and age. Falling in love is allowed.” “Pic to see what your ex missed out on.” “Downpour of Friend Requests. Post your age and add whoever likes your post.” These are some of the challenges that are common in popular groups on Facebook, in which hundreds of boys, girls, and teenagers participate. They reply with their photos and ages, which range between 10 and 17. But they don’t know what or who is behind these “games.”

At first glance, these seem like innocent interactions between minors. However, if you check who responds to their comments, you can find users who post photos and personal information, likely identifying them as adults, who are looking to get closer to those they reply to. These users ask to be friended, or they directly ask for video calls. In other cases, these users offer to send photos of their genitals.

UNICEF, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, defines grooming as sexual abuse that happens when adults communicate through digital means with young people under 18 years old because they want a sexual relationship. Groomers seek to earn the trust of their victims by using fake profiles, posing as minors, to obtain sexual content. In the worst cases, this occurs with the aim of sexually trafficking their victims.

This is a silent crime that happens throughout Latin America. Experts we reached out to in our reporting agree that this phenomenon has molded the way in which sexual predators lure their victims, which is why no social media platform has managed to rid itself of them. “We have detected some cases in game chats, or even YouTube,” says Sofía Martínez, Director of Fundación Habla.

While this phenomenon happens mostly in the dark, as it usually develops through private messaging, some public spaces online can give out clues about how adults try to contact minors.

In Facebook groups that are popular among children, there is a proliferation of posts inviting users to give personal information, which exposes them to adults who say they have “friendly” goals. This is one of the findings of “Innocence at Risk,” a journalistic investigation that Crónica Uno was part of along with four other Latin American and US outlets, and which was coordinated by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP).

A digital investigation this journalistic collaboration conducted via CrowdTangle—a tool that Meta deprecated on August 14th, 2024—looked for keywords and key phrases in Spanish used in posts meant to contact minors with sexual ends (such as “I show it to you,” or “falling in love is allowed”) published in public Facebook groups between March 10th, 2022, and the date of CrowdTangle’s closing. In total, this investigation found 20,913 coinciding posts.

Although not all of those posts correspond to adults trying to contact minors, we were able to identify some of the profiles that posted this type of content most often. For example, we found that in Güigüe, a town in the municipality of Carlos Arvelo in the state of Carabobo in Venezuela, there are some of the creators and administrators of some of these groups, as we could determine by the geographical information on their profiles.

“The hook”

Among the almost 21,000 posts we found, six profiles stood out: “Yostin (Niñö),” “Yostin,” “Yostin Vargas (Influ),” “Yostin Vargas (El Yôutûbêr),” “Yostin Vargas (YouTuber),” and “Mari Cruz (Sweetie),” which could be linked to the same person: Yostin Vargas. These accounts, which totaled 98,000 followers by February 2025, show up many times on the list of posts of this kind that received the most comments in the Facebook groups we identified in our investigation.

Graphic: Gabriela Garzón

Vargas is a young Venezuelan adult, according to information found in his profile, who is also an administrator for four of the public groups where these trends abound.

According to Facebook’s help center, group administrators have the responsibility to make these spaces safer. Among administrators’ functions are to eliminate, block, suspend, or limit the activity of other users, disable comments or replies to comments, and delete posts.

In 2021, Meta—the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram—announced that it would begin to ask group administrators and moderators to implement temporary content approval when their groups have a significant number of users that have violated their rules.

However, in the groups administered by Vargas not only are there inappropriate interactions of adults and minors: some of the content that elicits these interactions comes from his own posts.

These are patterns like the ones described above: games or phrases about romantic or sexual relationships that encourage their followers, most of them underage, to leave personal information such as photos or their age, after which other users, some of whom seem to be adults, send friend requests, or offer explicit content.

For example, a 40-year-old man calls an 11-year-old girl, who published her photo under one of Yostin’s posts in one of his groups, “beautiful.” In another post, a 12-year-old girl receives dozens of replies from men who seem to be adults. One of them asks her to friend him. This is a user whose profile is full of sexually explicit photos.

To better understand Facebook’s policies on child safety, we sent a series of questions to Meta. A spokesperson from Meta said that the company works “aggressively” to combat sexual abuse and avoid “unwanted interactions” between minors and adults through restrictions on messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger.

Regarding the moderation of sexual abuse content, Meta emphasized its policies to combat child exploitation, which includes “sharing or soliciting child exploitation imagery, inappropriate interactions with teens, and the explicit sexualization of minors.” Meta also highlighted the use of technology to identify adult accounts “that have shown potentially suspicious behavior.” However, a Meta spokesperson warned that “predators constantly change their tactics” to evade these restrictions.

Sofía Martínez from Fundación Habla, who has closely followed these cases in Venezuela, explains that “groomers always try to look for these kinds of networks.” She has identified how sexual predators pretend to be teenagers, using false identities, and try to create a bond of trust with emotional manipulation, which is why the first approach is not necessarily sexual in nature. Therefore, new strategies to detect inappropriate behaviors from adult users towards minors are crucial.

Meta’s spokesperson did not specify if there are sanctions for group administrators or moderators that keep their groups mostly unmoderated.

Vargas’s profiles don’t interact with the minors who reply to his posts. However, we did find that another profile belonging to someone claiming to be a 15-year-old girl, with whom Vargas says he has been in a romantic relationship for over two years, does reply to many of the comments made by minors under Vargas’s posts.

In one of his accounts, Vargas says he was born in December 1999, which means he is 24 years old now. To corroborate this, we looked over his public personal profiles and found photos proving he was 17 years old in 2016 (that we are not sharing, because he was a minor then).

This journalistic team contacted all of Vargas’s Facebook accounts to find out more about the aim of his posts. However, he did not reply by the time of publication.

Legal void

In a school in Petare, the largest neighborhood of the Metropolitan Area of Caracas, 17 teenagers listen to the talk given by Fundación Habla activists. This is an organization dedicated to the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse of boys, girls, and teenagers. Its director, Sofía Martínez, warns about digital grooming. Before beginning the talk, she asks: “Has anyone here received any inappropriate message?”. Six boys and ten girls raise their hands. They all have been the victims of exploitation online.

And it’s not just Facebook. The Division for Cybercrimes of the Criminal and Penal Investigation Corps (CICPC by its initials in Spanish) of Venezuela has warned about the danger that online platforms with integrated messaging features, such as social media or video games, can pose for the proliferation of this phenomenon.

Although there isn’t official data on the magnitude of this crime in Venezuela, each month Fundación Habla, the Network for the Human Rights of Boys, Girls, and Teenagers (REDHNNA), and Software Libre take on at least two new grooming cases each, say experts who work with them.

“It is difficult to deal with these sorts of cases. Firstly, because when groomers do these things, they try to avoid being tracked by IP, for example, or by their devices. Secondly, there isn’t legislation on these crimes,” says Sofía Martínez of Fundación Habla.

Venezuela’s Cybercrime Law was enacted in 2000, which is why experts say it is obsolete. Besides this legal mechanism, Venezuela has the Organic Law for the Protection of Boys, Girls, and Teenagers that criminalizes various kinds of violence and abuse that may occur in digital settings. However, this law makes no specific mention of grooming. There is also the Organic Law for Womens’ Right to a Life Free of Violence for cases in which the victims are girls or teenage girls, which could bring a psychological approach, says Gloriana Farías, a lawyer for REDHNNA and CECODAP, a human rights organization that seeks to prevent violence and encourages fair treatment of children and teenagers in families, schools, and communities.

Beyond this, the term “grooming” encompasses various crimes that are not in Venezuela’s legislation, says Narissa Aguilera, Director of Software Libre. Among them are identity duplication or the use of a false identity. “There isn’t a law that deals with digital identity. There is also no definition of the use of personal data … While technology evolves, so should laws.”

The three consulted organizations recommend the same: Report, preferably to CICPC. They say that of all of the security agencies in the country, this is the one that has been more active in lending assistance and support in these cases.

This journalistic team sent a request for information and an interview to the Division for Cybercrimes of the Criminal and Penal Investigation Corps. Their press office replied asking for more details about the media outlets in this collaboration, so they could forward this request to the Public Ministry. However, by the time of publication, we have not gotten any further response.

Prevention and early detection

In a technologically globalized world, protecting boys, girls, and teenagers from grooming implies a complex challenge. Not even an updated law would be enough to eradicate this problem, according to the experts consulted. For them, an ideal scenario would include the implementation of policies that promote prevention campaigns in media and educational centers and making digital literacy part of curricula. However, in a country where the issue is barely discussed, it seems like a distant goal. In this context, prevention at home is essential, and fathers and mothers play a fundamental role.

Isomar Paredes from CECODAP, a human rights organization that prevents violence and promotes good treatment of children and adolescents in families, schools, and communities, explains that early detection of this phenomenon is crucial, especially because it brings significant mental health harms for the victim. “It is a sexual crime that uses technology as a vehicle, but that remains a sexual crime. Therefore, indicators to identify this type of abuse are similar,” she says.

Changes in behavior, such as sadness, anxiety, crankiness, isolation, alteration of daily routines, dependence on mobile devices, or the sudden closure of social media accounts, are some alarm signals that should be listened to.

Besides paying attention to these symptoms, Paredes also recommends maintaining spaces for communication and dialogue to demonstrate trust and safety, generating rules for the use of technology, and keeping devices in family-shared spaces so minors’ activity can be monitored.

When a boy, girl, or teenager is a victim of this crime, it is likely that the perpetrator has threatened them, Paredes warns. Therefore, she recommends not to re-victimize, judge, or blame the minor. Paredes says that grooming is a process of manipulation and deceit and that the victim never sought to be part of this abuse.

Innocence at Risk is a journalistic investigation that reveals the risks of online sexual abuse faced by minors in Latin America on Facebook and other social networks. Led by the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), in alliance with Chequeado (Argentina), Crónica Uno (Venezuela), El Espectador (Colombia), Factchequeado and Tech Policy Press (United States).