'Are your parents home?': Inside the video chatrooms connecting British children with lewd strangers

Platforms like Uhmegle and Chatroulette state that users must be over 18, but are free to use and don’t require a login or any proof of age, making them easily accessible by children.

While some users look for platonic conversations with people from around the world, many are adults, mostly men, attempting to instigate lewd encounters.

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"Groomers have always been looking out for where they can contact children easily, and chat rooms have long provided exactly that opportunity for them," says LSE Professor Sonia Livingstone, an expert in child online safety.

And according to the NSPCC, online grooming crimes against children reached record levels across the UK last year, with offences topping 7,000 - an 89% increase in six years.

Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom threatens to fine sites which don’t protect children from adult content online. But despite an LBC listener lodging a complaint about the video chatrooms with the watchdog Ofcom in early August, the platforms are still operating with no checks.

Responding to LBC’s findings, a government spokesperson said platforms must ensure strangers have no way of messaging children or face enforcement action by Ofcom, adding “the time for companies to look the other way is over.”

Within minutes on the sites, a female LBC reporter was verbally assaulted and propositioned for cyber sex multiple times by men indicating they were masterbating. She was also matched with users who appeared to be under 18.

The NSPCC says the chatrooms are “unacceptable,” and are “in clear breach of their safety duties to children.”

“[Ofcom has] rightly emphasised that services will face consequences for failure to comply, and must ensure this is followed through with strong enforcement action,” says Rani Govender, Policy Manager for Child Safety Online at the NSPCC.

The format of these sites isn’t new - Chatroulette has been running since 2009 - and the severe risks the sites can pose are widely known.

One video chat platform, “Omegle”, closed down in 2023 following multiple investigations into child abuse being attributed to it.

In one case, a couple from Essex who used the platform to facilitate sexual offences against children were jailed last year for a total of 15 years.

Nick Barrett, 23 and Summer Andrew, 23, used former online chat site Omegle to commit sexual offences against children.

Barrett pleaded guilty to engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child and arranging or facilitating the commission of a child sex offence. He was jailed for 12 years.

Andrew was found guilty after a trial of arranging the commission of a child sex offence.She was jailed for three years.

A study carried out by Middlesex University discovered dozens of messages on online legal advice forums from Omegle users in which they admitted sexting with underage teens.

One chatroom user asked: “If you were on an anonymous chat site and you were talking to someone who claimed to be 18 or older and invited you to ‘sext’ with her on a picture messenger and exchanged some pictures and she revealed herself to be 12 could you get in trouble for that?”

Uhmegle, which looks and operates in a similar way to Omegle, was launched shortly after Omegle’s closure. Despite the latter's disturbing past, Uhmegle bills itself as "a top Omegle alternative."

“[Uhmegle developers] essentially used the technology from the closed Omegle platform, it would appear, to launch [Uhmegle],” says LBC tech correspondent Will Guyatt.

Anisa*, now in her early twenties, can clearly remember being exposed to shocking scenes when she used these types of sites with her friends as a child, saying they were able to access them “in two seconds” with no checks.

“In primary school, when I’d go back to my friend’s house and we’d have sleepovers, we’d go on [the video chatrooms],” she told LBC. “I would have been 9 or 10 years old, and it was just straight away [men exposing themselves]. At that age, I don’t think we fully understood what was happening.”

She remembers it being “kind of fun” to be talking to strangers and found it validating that adults were asking them questions, seemingly taking an interest in their lives.

“We'd find people who we would chat to and it would be a nice conversation. But then I think back on that, it was still like a 30 year old man speaking to children,” she says. “Even if there's no direct sexual undertone, I think it's still perverse, like there's still an element of… what are you doing?”

She says most of the time, though, the conversations turned sexual in nature. Either matches would be naked and lewd as soon as the chat connected, or they would try to befriend the girls first: “They would ask ‘what kind of activities do you do outside of school?’ And then it would turn to ‘do you want to take your top off?’... or ‘do you like PE?’ followed by asking if we were wearing bras yet.”

She says she and her friends were encouraged to keep their use of the sites secret from their parents by men they were video-chatting, who would ask if their parents had gone to bed yet, and whether they were alone in the house.

Adding that they were even exposed to more extreme scenes; one of the users appeared on screen to be pretending to self-harm while performing a sexual act.

Reflecting on the experience years later, Anisa remembers feeling robbed of her right to consent, which she says impacted her early relationships.

Uhmegle’s landing page states that it “uses a combination of advanced AI and human moderation to monitor chats” and “access by minors is strictly forbidden under any circumstances.” The site is run by Techmaks Ltd, a company registered to an address in London. Its director is listed as 23-year-old computer science graduate Maks Ovnik.

Chatroulette’s rules include “no inappropriate or suggestive content,” and says the site is “strictly for adults.” Its policy page says it’s operated by CR Services AG, a company registered in Switzerland.

“These organisations don't share much information,” says Guyatt. “They don't get the same level of scrutiny as Meta or Twitter… They're not seen in quite the same way because they're much smaller tech companies.”

Ofcom’s children’s codes under the Online Safety Act threaten to fine or take down sites which don’t have robust age checks in place to protect young people from harmful content and being contacted by strangers, but while major adult sites now require proof of ID to access in the UK, the video chatrooms LBC has investigated aren’t yet complying.

Chatroulette and Uhmegle haven’t responded to LBC’s request for comment.

Ofcom has told LBC: “Our rules demand a safety-first approach in how tech firms design and operate their services in the UK.

"They mean safer social media feeds for children with less harmful and dangerous content, protections from being contacted by strangers and effective age checks on adult content. Sites that don’t comply should expect to face enforcement action.”

A government spokesperson said: “The law is clear. Under the Online Safety Act, platforms where users can interact with each other must protect children from harmful content, including pornographic content.

“They must also ensure that strangers have no way of messaging children on their platforms."