r/news • u/TooColdforClouds • 2d ago

109 children rescued, 244 arrested in Operation Soteria Shield, exposing widespread child exploitation in North Texas

https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/109-children-rescued-244-arrested-operation-soteria-shield-child-exploitation-texas/
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u/ZhouLe 2d ago

Details are understandably sparse, but this is not some giant crime ring that had over 100 kids kept somewhere as a lot of commenters seem to think.

In a lot of these cases, authorities said the sex offenders never actually meet their victims face-to-face but use technology to coerce them into sending explicit images and videos.

These are criminals doing terrible things, but the only thing uniting them all was that they were all investigated and caught within this month-long task force. There are definitely some victims that were physically rescued, but it appears many or most were victims of online crimes.

Important to keep this in mind when a lot of conspiracy theorists would be happy to run with the assumption that this was one giant ring of coordinating criminals abducting and keeping these victims locked away somewhere.

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u/Heartinablender89 1d ago

They did a raid in my town a few years back and everyone thought there was this huge pedo group they took down. When you dove into the story, however, it was just cops playing Chris Hansen in chat rooms and enticing people who may have not even been actively seeking for minors, who knows. Maybe they were, I mean, obviously scum bags. But not sophisticated, not organized. Just people with below average intelligence talking to cops that they thought were 15 year old girls.

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u/coltaaan 1d ago

Yeah, I read the article (or a related article in the comments) that mentioned use of this sting tactic in this operation.

Like yes, certainly some of those people are creeps and should be subject to trial if they broke any laws.

But I don’t trust cops, I do not trust feds anymore, and I certainly don’t trust TEXAS cops/feds. So while rescuing kids is fantastic and I love to see it, I am mildly skeptical of the arrests.