College student secured 3 yrs after sharing child porn to friend on Insta

CHENNAI: A first-year college student landed in trouble for sharing child pornography material to a friend on Instagram when he was in school as police have detained him for an inquiry after receiving information from a US-based NGO.

Police said that the NGO named National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is engaged in monitoring the circulation of pornographic material on social media across the world and sharing the details with the respective governments.

In 2019, the NGO reportedly sent a list of suspected social media profiles to the Home Ministry and the respective states were alerted about the links where they were operated from.

The crime against women and children wing which received the particulars of one of the cases forwarded it to the Vepery Assistant Commissioner for probing the matter in April.

With the information that the pornographic material was shared from an Instagram account linked to a phone number and an e-mail ID, police secured the boy from his house in Choolai on Wednesday and inquiries revealed that he downloaded the child pornography from porn websites in 2019, when he was a Class 11 student, and shared it with a friend via Instagram. He is currently pursuing a degree at a private college in the city, said police.

Vepery all-women police are interrogating the suspect. When contacted, police officials said that he was not formally arrested yet.