How to Abduct a 7-Year-Old Boy

A look at the internet’s role in child kidnappings and trafficking.

*This is an expose written to bring attention to how child kidnapping and sex trafficking happens online in 2020. Mature and upsetting themes are discussed. Reader discretion is advised.*

In the year 2000, after the world’s computer systems didn’t collapse at midnight on New Year’s Day, I was playing a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) called EverQuest. I was 9 years old.

I was part of a guild: a group of people who played together at specific times and helped each other advance in the game. We communicated via the built-in text chat. There was no voice chat available in online games back then.

I learned a lot of internet shorthand from playing EverQuest, like afk (away from keyboard), brb (be right back), and roflmao (rolling on floor laughing my ass off). I also learned some colorful vocabulary words, like bastard and snare.

Some of the guild members I played with were people my dad or uncles knew in real life. Others we didn’t know from Adam. But we’d stay up late, playing the game and chatting. For big raids (when a group is going after a big monster) we would connect a headset to our home telephone and group-call some of the guild members we knew.

As I got older, I had a Myspace page, a Xanga blog, and multiple AngelFire websites. By the time I was 12, I was proficient in coding front-end websites and managed…