Trinida­di­an men and women are sell­ing and trad­ing child rape videos on the so­cial me­dia app Telegram for as much as $200.

At least one per­son in­volved in the porn ring says 207 videos are avail­able for that price. He’s on a Telegram group called Tri­ni’s School leaks/twerks Videos, which had 945 mem­bers as of yes­ter­day.

That chat is a mar­ket for buy­ing and sell­ing child porno­graph­ic con­tent.

Porno­graph­ic con­tent fea­tur­ing lo­cal fe­males—which range from young girls to old­er women—are al­so avail­able for pur­chase on Telegram.

In ad­di­tion, some men are even sell­ing in­ti­mate pic­tures their ex-part­ners would have sent to the porn groups for mon­ey. If in­ter­est­ed per­sons can’t pay for con­tent, some men are trad­ing nude pho­tos of women for oth­er nude im­ages.

“I spend­ing my mon­ey for this? Alyuh rel f*@&%$ stink in here,” one per­son post­ed in one group chat, which has 8,525 mem­bers.

Mean­while, in oth­er Telegram groups, some peo­ple are tak­ing women’s pho­tos from their so­cial me­dia pages, al­ter­ing it via Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (AI) soft­ware so that they ap­pear nude, and sell­ing them. Up for sale in the var­i­ous group chats are dig­i­tal­ly al­tered pho­tos that women ini­tial­ly post­ed with them­selves ful­ly clothed in their so­cial me­dia which are now nude im­ages.

Cu­ri­ous to find out if nudes ex­ist of a per­son?

Peo­ple are tak­ing pic­tures of girls off their so­cial me­dia pages and post­ing them on the chats seek­ing nude im­ages of them.

Guardian Me­dia, with sup­port from IT con­sul­tant Shiv­am Teelucks­ingh, has iden­ti­fied 22 groups on Telegram sell­ing and trad­ing lo­cal porno­graph­ic con­tent.

You can view the name chats if you have the app but to join the chats you need an in­vite.

There are thou­sands of peo­ple—men and women—on these chats and at any giv­en time there are hun­dreds of peo­ple on­line in the chat.

The chats are: Best of Tri­ni/Vin­cy/Ba­jan/Guyanese, Va­zou Teens, Tri­ni Pret­ty Pipers na­tion­wide, A-Leaks, T&T Sex Group (Es­corts and more), Sin­ful Leaks TT, Trinidad Freaks all day, Noth­ing but steam, Pret­ty lit­tle piper’s, Wet It Up, On­ly lo­cal leaks, Tri­ni hub, Tri­ni school leaks, Tri­ni bare­ly le­gal leaks, Trinidad Pret­ty lit­tle pipers, The Con­ti­nen­tal regime, T&T Un­seen Con­tent 2023, Alya rel f*****ing stink in here, Trinidad no lim­it, leaks on­ly, Tri­ni nude on­ly 2024 and Lo­cal 2024.

Telegram is en­crypt­ed and al­lows users to be anony­mous.

How women are find­ing out

Women, who found out their pri­vate ma­te­r­i­al was be­ing shared, joined the groups to see what was sold and were un­suc­cess­ful in try­ing to rea­son with the chat mem­bers to get their con­tent re­moved from the sites.

One of the vic­tims said she was scared to talk, as she was now get­ting over a “re­venge porn” ex­pe­ri­ence and it’s now hap­pen­ing all over again.

She said pic­tures and videos she sent to her ex were leaked and when con­front­ed, he de­nied do­ing this.

She said there was no one to re­port it to be­cause the groups don’t have names.

She said when she tried to take mat­ters in­to her own hands and go in­to the groups, she was bom­bard­ed and threat­ened with rape and death.

“It re­al­ly dis­turbs me to go on and I hope some oth­er girls can come for­ward who were hu­mil­i­at­ed as well. It put so much men­tal strain on me, it re­al­ly made me hurt and not able to trust any­one,” she said.

An­oth­er woman told Guardian Me­dia that her fam­i­ly was un­aware of the con­tent be­ing cir­cu­lat­ed and it was a stress­ful ex­pe­ri­ence.

“My past re­la­tion­ship end­ed bad­ly and even though I part­ed ways with the per­son, months lat­er I came across con­tent I nev­er thought I would have. The re­la­tion­ship end­ed in Jan­u­ary 2023, but clos­er to Sep­tem­ber 2023, I re­ceived mes­sages from a friend of a friend on Face­book, ask­ing about an­oth­er pro­file which used my pic­tures, un­der a dif­fer­ent name. He asked if it was me and then af­ter ex­plain­ing it’s not, the per­son sent me the con­tent of pic­tures and videos of me which were tak­en by my ex-boyfriend.

“When I tried seek­ing help from a po­lice of­fi­cer I knew, he asked for the videos per­son­al­ly, claim­ing that he would try to get some in­sight us­ing some way to track who the videos was pos­si­bly sent around by. Noth­ing came from it so I just pushed it aside and moved on with my life.

“Fast for­ward to Jan­u­ary 2024, two oth­er friends What­sApp mes­saged me to tell me that there is con­tent cir­cu­lat­ing on a Telegram group which shares con­tent of women. The per­son which would have sent the con­tent of me in­to the Telegram chats blocked their num­ber and had ini­tials as their name, so it was a dead end to get any in­for­ma­tion about who sent the con­tent in­to the chat.”

She added, “It’s a ter­ri­fy­ing thing to think about if this goes fur­ther and fur­ther and the lever­age peo­ple can have on you, tar­nish­ing your rep­u­ta­tion etc. A lot of young women give in to the norm of try­ing to please their sig­nif­i­cant oth­er on­ly to then re­alise lat­er on, that per­son’s in­ten­tions weren’t true and they dis­re­spect you in so many ways which now will af­fect you in nu­mer­ous ways, es­pe­cial­ly maybe in the fu­ture.”

More “sick” con­tent

IT con­sul­tant Teelucks­ingh told Guardian Me­dia that there is a lo­cal pho­tog­ra­ph­er who has a group, in which he shares pic­tures of women he would have pho­tographed.

“I have a few friends who were post­ed in these groups and that’s why I start­ed in­ves­ti­gat­ing. When they spoke out about these groups, they have got­ten calls and threats to scare them, so much so they de­clined to speak out on it or even do to the au­thor­i­ties,” Teelucks­ingh said.

“There are peo­ple with On­ly Fans where these per­sons sub­scribe and take all the pho­tos and pics and leak them in­to a very pri­vate group which even­tu­al­ly gets out to the pub­lic ones. There’s a guy from Guyana with a group; he lit­er­al­ly dates women and makes videos and leaks them all over or sells them as well. It’s re­al­ly dis­gust­ing and the moral of this is over­looked as ‘oh well, she send him the pics’ or ‘oh, she was al­ways a bad thing’. This isn’t an ex­cuse for this.”

He added, “There are more pre­mi­um groups that have even more “sick” con­tent, which has a lot of wealthy peo­ple who pay. There are groups that tar­get chil­dren as well but they are even more pri­vate and dis­solve and come back as dif­fer­ent names.”

Teelucks­ingh is try­ing to cre­ate aware­ness so that women can be aware of what they post on so­cial me­dia and how their im­ages can be ma­nip­u­lat­ed.

Fur­ther­more, there are im­pli­ca­tions for be­ing black­mailed or just be­ing pub­licly hu­mil­i­at­ed.

“Telegram al­lows you to be anony­mous but there are a few ways to find these folks, as a lot of them are start­ing to use cryp­to wal­lets to do trans­ac­tions for pics, videos, es­corts, drugs and more. Some are us­ing lo­cal bank ac­counts but they want to video call you and want your ID to en­sure they know who you are. Some buy used SIM cards from dif­fer­ent places and use that to gain top-up cred­it as pay­ment for their ser­vices etc which they then sell to peo­ple,” he said.

“These groups on­ly scratch the sur­face of an ever-grow­ing un­der­bel­ly with­in T&T and the Caribbean. Re­sources need to be giv­en to cy­ber­crime, and Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to give them the means need­ed to take down this type of en­ti­ty and pro­tect not on­ly our women but chil­dren as well,” he said.

Cops ask vic­tims to come for­ward

Con­tact­ed on the is­sue yes­ter­day, Joanne Archie, Man­ag­er, Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the TTPS, said they would im­me­di­ate­ly en­gage the Cy­ber Crime and So­cial Me­dia Unit and the Child Pro­tec­tion Unit to start a probe in­to the mat­ter.

“We would be en­gag­ing those two units to launch an im­me­di­ate in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­cause those are is­sues that the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice would not con­done.”

Ad­mit­ting that the unit may have been un­aware of the ac­tiv­i­ty un­til be­ing alert­ed yes­ter­day by Guardian Me­di­an, Archie added, “Of course this would be a con­cern for us, since those are is­sues that we ad­dress every day in the pub­lic do­main and we ad­vise per­sons who have in­for­ma­tion on these is­sues to come for­ward and both the Cy­ber Crime and Child Pro­tec­tion Unit would col­lab­o­rate on any in­ves­ti­ga­tions com­ing out of this in­for­ma­tion.”

Al­so con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, head of the TTPS Spe­cial Vic­tims De­part­ment, Claire-Guy Al­leyne, al­so said they had not re­ceived any re­ports pri­or.

“My of­fi­cers are un­aware of this ac­tiv­i­ty but per­sons who have in­for­ma­tion, they ought to come for­ward and give us the in­for­ma­tion so we could com­mence an in­ves­ti­ga­tion,” she said.