'Children at risk' on Kik app, senior police officer warns as child abuse reports from messaging service quadruple

The popular messaging app Kik is a haven for paedophiles, a senior police chief has warned as the number of UK child abuse reports relating to the service has quadrupled in the last two and a half years.

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the child protection lead for the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said “children are at risk” on the app, which allows users to join anonymously without a phone number.

According to the NPCC, the number of referrals police have received relating to the app for child abuse images and grooming has surged from a monthly average of 48 in 2016 to 195 in 2018.

As a result, UK police forces have opened more than 1,500 investigations involving Kik so far this year.

Kik is an instant messaging service with around 300 million registered users worldwide and is particularly popular with teenagers for features such as its emoji stickers.

Unlike other messaging services such as WhatsApp, Kik allows users to signup without a phone number and then find and message other people via just their username.

The Canadian company, which was founded in 2010, has a minimum age of 13 but does not verify users’ ages.

Mr Bailey said: “What you have got is people who can go on there and purport to be whoever they might want to be and then you know what goes on in the background.

“Kik is an exemplar of what I would describe as terribly poor practice which gives paedophiles the confidence to go online and groom.

He added: “Children are at risk.”

Mr Bailey, who is also the Chief Constable for Norfolk Constabulary, said the rise in Kik referrals had come as police were dealing with huge increase in the number of online child abuse cases in recent years.

He said that £20 million was currently being invested into police operations tackling internet grooming.

“Many parents work on the premise that ‘well my child’s upstairs in the bedroom they’re safe’ and they are just not,” said Mr Bailey.

“Now I don’t scaremonger, I don’t like to shroud wave, but you only have to look at the numbers to see we have a huge, huge problem here. It’s massive.”

In recent years, Kik has been heavily criticised in the US, where it is particularly popular, for its approach to child safety.

In 2016, it came under scrutiny after 13-year-old Nicole Lovell, from Virginia, was abducted and murdered by a man law enforcement say she talked to on Kik.

In an interview during a special investigation on CBS News into the murder, a convicted child molester described Kik as a "predator's paradise".

Earlier this month the app was also criticised by a UK judge, Mark Horton, for taking a “frustrating” approach to UK police requests for access to messages of suspected  child groomers.

Mr Horton said that Kik limited the police’s ability to investigate Andrew Donovan, a 35-year-old, from Bristol, who was jailed for 28 months after admitting grooming a 14-year-old boy and sending indecent images via the messaging app.

The court was told that in cases were there was one complainant, Kik would only open the messages to police between the suspect and the alleged victim.

Mr Horton said that Kik only gave access to all of an alleged groomer’s messages if there was more than one complainant.

Kik told The Telegraph that it was spending $10 million (£7.6 million) on improving its safety measures.

A spokesman said: “This is a priority for us. We want all users to be safe on Kik and will continue to make Kik a safe, positive and productive place for our users to interact.”

“We take online safety very seriously, and we’re constantly assessing and improving our trust and safety measures.

“There are two ways we do this. One is through technology and constant improvements to the product itself. We encourage users to report content that they believe violates the Kik Terms of Service and Community Standards.

“Users are also able to Block other users they no longer wish to chat with, or ignore chats from people that they don’t know. Actions are taken against users found to have violated Kik’s Community Standards and TOS, including removal from the Kik platform where circumstances warrant.

“The other is through education and partnerships with organizations that help adults and teens understand the challenges of today’s online landscape and how to avoid bad situations.

“For years, we’ve had teams dedicated to this, and we will continue to invest in those types of tools, provide resources to parents, and strengthen relationships with law enforcement and safety-focused organizations.

“This is a priority for us. We want all users to be safe on Kik and will continue to make Kik a safe, positive and productive place for our users to interact.”