See How Mum Saved Daughter From This Online Predator

A savvy mum has helped the police arrest a sex offender who was trying to arrange a meeting with her young daughter reports Yahoo Parenting. The mother, whose daughter is under 15 years old and wishes to remain anonymous, was monitoring her daughter’s Facebook page when she spotted messages from an older man she didn’t know. Robert Winn, a police lieutenant in Colonie, New York reportedly said, “The messages at first were about trying to meet; [they] seemed innocuous.”

The mum responded to the messages to find out more about who this man was. He wrote back right away, thinking he was emailing with her daughter, and his messages quickly became sexual in nature. The mum did some sleuthing to find out more about him and discovered that the man, 33-year-old Dennis Williams of Nassau, New York, was not only using his real name, but that he’s also a level 2 sex offender.

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Williams was convicted of attempting to distribute indecent material to a minor in 2009. The mom called the police, who then set up a sting operation. Investigators pretended to be the mom’s daughter and contacted Williams under the guise of meeting for a sexual encounter. Williams then texted nude photos of himself to what he thought was the daughter. When Williams showed up at the meeting point, he was arrested and is currently in jail without bail.

Police are now giving the mum kudos for keeping a close eye on her daughter’s social media account. Winn said,

“They have a good enough relationship where the mom was monitoring her Internet activities, and in this case, it prevented what could have possibly been a very bad decision on her part, as well as a criminal act on his.

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That day he sent the message to her, he sent the same message to hundreds of other girls, and they were friends of hers or friends of friends, and that’s how he got her name. His intent that day was to have sex with an underage female, and we prevented that from happening.”

Mary Kay Hoal, an expert in children’s online safety recommends that parents have an ongoing, open conversation with their children and teens about their social media activity, including monitoring their accounts and talking to them about the risks of interacting with strangers online.