Galery

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Under a new law the Greek police can create fake Facebook profiles in order to apprehend persons who are suspected of child pornography and other crimes, as reported by the Greek daily To Vima. In the future, the tactic of creating virtual users on the social networks will aim not only at searching for clues but also at proving the existence of criminal activities.

All major police departments have special analysts who follow Facebook posts and their goal is to find links between suspects of committing crimes and even stolen items of which mostly thieves of foreign origin boast.

The law was passed a few days ago and is based on the European directive. From now on, every conversation that indicates the existence of a criminal action or a request for sending images and other files on the part of a policeman who has created a fake profile will be a signal for the arrest of his interlocutor on the social networks. The virtual users created by the Greek police are secured with a special certificate. In this way, the person apprehended for a crime will be arrested, and all e-mails, "likes", photos and chat messages on the social networks will be considered as evidence.

Moreover, the new law allows for the direct arrest of paedophiles who simply connect to websites that show rapes of children, thus punishing, for the first time, not only the dissemination of pornographic content involving children but even the watching thereof. Meanwhile, the police will have the right to immediately remove such websites.

The police authorities were thus able to find a 21-year-old man who had killed a homeless woman in a park in the Athens suburb of Glyfada around this Easter. From his activities on the Internet, they realized that he was a Satanist and had killed the woman with the idea of sacrificing her to the devil. During the investigation, the police found that he had shared the commission of the murder with other users.

The perpetrators of the murder of a young girl in Kastoria in 2011 and of a man, aged 30, in 2010, were also detected through their Facebook posts.

The method of action of the authorities is as follows: Following the murder the motives of which are not clear, the police often investigate the victim’s "profile" on the social networks in order to detect  a suspicious post on their "walls", "like" of a photo or anything else that may be associated with the murder.

In addition, they create "charts" of gangs after an analysis of the common "friends" of the main group of suspects and make relevant connections and comparisons. In parallel, they investigate the activities of the suspects on the social networks at the time of the commission of the crimes, thus checking their alibis. The effectiveness of the method is proven by two cases in which the police were able to break up a criminal gang of Albanian citizens as they found in the profiles of its members pictures in which they posed with guns, wads of cash, and other stolen items.