Girls Lured to Meet Online Stranger in Shocking Social Experiment

Girls Lured to Meet Online Stranger in Shocking Social Experiment
Aug 14, 2015, 3:06 PM ET
By ABC NEWS via GOOD MORNING AMERICA


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A social experiment posted on YouTube is getting a lot of attention -- an attempt to show how easy it can be for strangers to target teens.

In the video, which has garnered more than 24 million hits, a 13-year-old girl is seen meeting up with a complete stranger she met online, but what she doesn’t know is that this is an experiment and her father is waiting close by.

The young man she’s meeting in the park after texting with him is Coby Persin, a YouTube star known for silly and outrageous pranks. But this stunt is catching the attention of millions of parents who are now asking if their kids are also at risk.

“I went into this and didn’t know it was going to work, and then I knew it was going to be a big video when I showed it to my mother and then she cried,” Persin told ABC News. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’”

To begin, Persin made a Facebook profile posing as a 15-year-old boy.

“With the parents’ permission I friend requested three girls, ages 14, 13 and 12-years old,” he explains in the video.

After texting and chatting on the phone, he told the girls he wanted to meet up. Persin was in touch with the girls’ parents the entire time, keeping them informed about the exchanges and conversations they were having.

“I don’t think she’s going to open the door,” one father told him.

“She just said, ‘I think my dad’s asleep. You can come now,” Persin told the dad of his daughter’s actions.

The dramatic video is sparking a barrage of comments on social media, most saying it’s hard to watch but needs to be seen.

Some teens were more cautious than to meet up with Persin, however. He says he initially contacted six young girls and three of them quickly backed away from him online.

Child safety advocate Callahan Walsh is the National Outreach Coordinator for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“It does pain me to watch this video,” he said. “We do want to keep our kids safe, but we don’t encourage parents to resort to scare tactics like this one. It’s really about ongoing conversations that they need to have with their children. I’m sure these three girls in this case learned their lesson, but again it’s not something we parents should have to resort to.”

Callahan says parents can show this video to their children as a “teachable moment.”

He recommends having ongoing conversation with your kids.

“Pertaining to this video particularly, I think the most important thing is for children to never go meet somebody in the real world that they met online if they don’t already know them in person,” Callahan explained. “So meeting somebody that they just met online is the number one thing that we tell parents to tell their kids, ‘Don’t do.’”

Another topic to discuss with your children is making sure they aren’t giving out their personal information.

“Making sure that you’re not putting out your full name, your address, things like that, and only allowing people to view your page that you know in real life,” he said. “You shouldn’t be accepting friend requests from people that you don’t know.”