site.btaTotal of 293,312 Alerts of Online Child Abuse Recorded in 2024, Bulgarian Safer Internet Centre Coordinator Says

In the first nine months of the year there were 293,312 reports of online child abuse, Bulgarian Safer Internet Centre Coordinator Antoaneta Vassileva told a press conference in Sofia on Friday. She noted that 99% of the reports were related to girls, 1% to boys. The main age group is between 10 and 14 years old.

The Bulgarian Safer Internet Centre presented an analysis based on the work of the lines it manages - the Advisory Line (Helpline) 124 123 and its chat, as well as the Hotline for reporting harmful content and online crimes against children. The hotlines handle reports from children and parents about stolen accounts, sexting, online bullying, scams and threats, content abuse, password cracking of apps, etc.

Vassileva noted that in the last three months of the year there are the most signals.

The international network INHOPE is one of the main sources of alerts. "When they find criminal content hosted in Bulgaria, they send it to us," Vassileva explained. A total of 44,766 signals were received from foreign partners of the INHOPE system, 41,190 were sent to the Cybercrime Directorate of the General Directorate for Combating Organized Crime (DGCOC) as signals confirmed as illegal content hosted in Bulgaria. A total of 248,546 alerts have been sent to INHOPE.

In total, 72% of the issues occurred on social networks, 17% on a communication apps, 10% on online games, and 1% on websites. Whistleblowers are mostly parents - 58%, and children - 42%. Only nine alerts came from teachers.

"Most signals come to us from the UK, the Netherlands and Slovakia," Vassileva said, adding that over 100,000 of the signals were related to the Telegram app.