Regional Team Nabs Culprits in Cyberspace

The sinister world of child exploitation can be tough to crack. Especially when the culprits lurk in cyberspace.

There they don’t have to use their real names or their real ages, but instead, draw on their adult sophistication to lure adolescent Internet users out of chat rooms and into their sexual fantasies.

The Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement Team, a regional law enforcement group made up of officers from local, state and federal agencies, works to covertly infiltrate the World Wide Web and catch sexual predators.

Their efforts helped to put away convicted Calabasas sex offender Francis John Kufrovich, 43, who was sentenced last month to 18 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to luring a 13-year-old Connecticut girl he met in cyberspace to a hotel to have sex in March 1996.

Every six months during his three-year probation, Kufrovich will be tested by polygraph to determine whether he is avoiding minors as ordered, said District of Connecticut Assistant U.S. Atty. Gates Garrity-Rokous.

The SAFE team served a search warrant on Kufrovich’s home and interviewed several other children allegedly victimized by Kufrovich. The allegations are still under investigation, authorities said.

“Cases such as this involving enticement or travel to engage in sex with a minor could not occur without substantial cooperation between districts and local [Los Angeles] authorities,” Garrity-Rokous said. The investigation “was at no small cost to them in terms of time. We had a Connecticut victim and they went out of their way to help us.”

Since its inception in 1995, SAFE has investigated various types of child exploitation cases including pornography, molestation and child abductions, including those involving parents embroiled in custody battles. The team covers seven counties, from San Luis Obispo south to Orange and east to Riverside.

The cases that get the highest priority are those involving child abductions by strangers because the window of time to find an abducted child and return him or her safely to parents is short, said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Randy Aden, program manager of SAFE.

“Most parents’ greatest fear is that their child will be abducted,” he said. “That’s a small percentage of child molesters.”

A larger percentage are those who operate on the Internet. Using a false name, they enter teenage chat rooms in hopes of meeting a young boy or girl who they will try to lure to another location for possible sex, authorities say. Others will download or put their own child pornography on the Internet.

Catching these predators is not easy, said SAFE team member Carlos Martinez, a special agent supervisor with the California Department of Justice Bureau of Investigations. Undercover officers have gone online and pretended to be 13-year-old boys and girls in attempts to find sexual predators in chat rooms. But sometimes the person talking to the “youngster” is only a curiosity-seeker or someone interested in “dirty talk,” not trying to lure a youth into a sexual encounter.

And to nab someone downloading child pornography on the Internet, police have to catch them actually online sitting at their computer, authorities said.

“We encourage parents to know where their children are going on the Internet,” said Patricia Donahue, assistant U.S. attorney who prosecutes cases investigated by SAFE. “Many times children know more about computers and the Internet than their parents do. Parents wouldn’t let their children talk to strangers. Parents should approach the Internet the same way.”