Families of SOs Community Group
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Let's say that you accidentally download cp and you get caught. In the course of the cops examining your computer and email they find other emails showing you have been conversing with underage people, so they tack on additional charges.
Unfortunately neither you, the cops, nor the prosecutor know that the email conversations you have been having are not with a human being but a bot, and you get convicted anyway.
So, I got to wondering if this is something that has happened because bots mimic human's even in having cyber sex conversations based on tag lines that one enters in an email or other electronic communication that they write and you may not even know you are chatting with a computer program called a bot.
Craigslist is, or so I am told, a major player in computer bots responding to ad's that are posted and replying when someone responds to an ad.
Unfortunately neither you, the cops, nor the prosecutor know that the email conversations you have been having are not with a human being but a bot, and you get convicted anyway.
So, I got to wondering if this is something that has happened because bots mimic human's even in having cyber sex conversations based on tag lines that one enters in an email or other electronic communication that they write and you may not even know you are chatting with a computer program called a bot.
Craigslist is, or so I am told, a major player in computer bots responding to ad's that are posted and replying when someone responds to an ad.
http://tinyurl.com/qeejfcw
In the type of case you describe they would not be able to charge anyone with actually soliciting a minor but they would be able to charge attempted solicitation of a minor. In many states the statutes used include a phrase like "or attempted to" to cover things like this or the use of police decoys. The fact that it wasn't even a human probably won't mean much. Criminal attempt liability focuses on the circumstances as the actor believed them to be not as they actually were so the authorities will claim the defendant believed he was talking to an actual minor therefore he is criminally liable.