Picture clue: cops turn to amateur web sleuths to help crack cases
Europol gets thousands of tips after appealing to public to identify crime scene images
It looks like a normal bathroom tile. But when amateur internet sleuths managed to locate it, they found the missing piece in an international child abuse investigation.
This was one of the clues that led to the arrest of a suspect and the identification of nine child abuse victims.
There’s nothing new about the police asking for tips – think missing person posters or episodes of Crimewatch. But the Trace an Object crowdsourcing effort launched by Europol in 2017 asks individuals and collectives to find clues for unsolved child abuse investigations by identifying parts of digital images.
