‘Nuclear arms race against AI’ as police reveal secret ‘calculator’ apps used by paedos to hide child abuse images

Detective Chief Inspector James Gray, of Essex Police, told us his team is now ‘more often than not’ finding AI-generated images of child abuse when downloading data from phones, computers and tablets taken from paedophiles.

DCI Gray's warning comes after Home Office data revealed police forces across England and Wales recorded 38,685 child sexual abuse image offences last year - an average of more than 100 every day.

The government told us it would not "hesitate to go further" to deal with the issue.

Giving LBC a behind-the-scenes look at how technology is used to trawl through hundreds of thousands of pictures and text messages, DCI Gray said AI is posing a ‘big problem’.

“It's a global challenge,” he said. “As quickly as technology is being developed to identify it, technology has been developed to counteract that.

“We’re continuously having to look at opportunities for us to monitor it, track it and identify it as best as we can to try and combat it.”

The government has announced that new laws will be introduced to make creating explicit deep fake images a criminal offence, with perpetrators facing up to two years in jail.

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AI tools designed to create child sexual abuse material are also being made illegal while Ofcom has given apps and online sites until next week to assess the risk they pose to children.

Explaining the process of downloading a device, DCI Gray said: “The software can download any number of messages from all different platforms.

“So, for example, Facebook messenger, iMessages, WhatsApp. You could be looking at tens of thousands of messages that it will be downloading and images as well.

“And it provides us opportunities to look at the data to analyse when it was taken, where it was taken and who it may have been taken by.

“There’s nowhere on the device that we can’t see; there’s nowhere to hide.”

DCI Gray also highlighted the rise he’s seeing in secret photo vault apps, disguised as things like calculators, being used to hide abuse material.

Looking at the downloaded data from an iPad, plugged into his computer, he said: “The app on the device looks like a normal calculator, but the reality is it’s a vault of images that may be accessed by a passcode.

“Normally with a calculator you’re looking at a megabyte of storage at most but if you’re seeing this one that’s in the hundreds of megabytes and that generally indicates there’s probably something that shouldn’t be in there.”

LBC then watched as he showed on the iPad how the app takes a picture of anyone trying to access the backroom of photos and videos, when the wrong passcode was entered.

Officials say that in the majority of cases, child sexual abuse images are being collected by other minors, with a rise in the number of ‘sextortion’ cases also being recorded - where pictures are used for blackmail.

Detective Superintendent Naomi Edwards, who is head of proactive safeguarding at Essex Police, said the world ‘would be a safer place’ if teenagers didn’t have access to smartphones.

She said: “We’re seeing AI being used more in sextortion cases as well, where a very innocent image that a child might send to one of their peers is being changed, using AI.

“Children are then being blackmailed with someone saying to them ‘you don’t want that to be sent round your family and friends’, and they’re being told to do certain things or send money.

“When we look at a lot of our offenses, especially around child sexual exploitation and where it is peer on peer, it’s mobile devices that are enabling the offence.

“If they didn’t have those devices, they wouldn’t be able to commit the offence. It's as simple as that.

“And if we remove the work of having to deal with peer-on-peer offences, that gives us the time to concentrate on paedophile rings, where it’s all grown men and they're targeting children.”

Jess Phillips, Minister for Safeguarding and Violence against Women and Girls, told LBC: “Creating, possessing, or distributing child sexual abuse material, including AI-generated images, is abhorrent and illegal.

“We will stop at nothing to protect our children and public, which is why our landmark Crime and Policing Bill will make the UK the first country in the world to introduce further AI child sexual abuse offences, making it illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools designed to generate heinous child sex abuse material.

“Under the Online Safety Act, platforms of all sizes also have to remove this kind of content, or they could face significant fines. We continue to work closely with law enforcement agencies to support their efforts in identifying offenders and will not hesitate to go further.”