Kids are being lured into vape shops by criminals looking to groom them with

Children are being lured into vape shops by criminals looking to groom them with ‘freebies’ – before being ‘tracked on Snapchat and blackmailed’, according to police.

Kids are at risk of being sexually and criminally exploited, cops have warned. They’re urging parents to speak to their kids about their Snapchat live location sharing settings.

Many children allow GPS tracking in the popular app as it lets friends see where they’ve been. Cops say they believe the feature is playing into the hands of manipulative criminals.

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Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne Keenaghan, GMP’s designated force coordinator for child protection, spoke to the Manchester Evening News about the issue as hundreds of cops took part in a day of action as part of Operation Avro.

The force-wide initiative sees extra resources put into a different district or type of crime each month. This time round, cops focused on children protection.

Officers made 33 arrests for a variety of offences, including sexual offences, including rape; possession of indecent images; and possession with intent to supply class A and B drugs. Thousands of pounds-worth of drugs, cash and illegal items were seized.

As part of the operation, police raided shop suspected of selling illegal vapes, which they say often leads to kids being coerced into criminal activity or sexual exploitation. Around £20,000 in illegal or non-compliant devices were seized, along with dodgy sweets and imitation guns.

“Vape shops and vapes are created to attract children and entice them into purchasing them,” DCI Keenaghan said. “Exploiters are using that façade, within that setting, to get children to go to that location.

“Once they’re at that location, it can be used to manipulate the child. So they could give out vapes for free and eventually you [the child] find out that it wasn’t free and now you owe them.

“It can be the beginning of a grooming journey for a child.” Asked how criminals find children who’ve been in their stores, the top cop added: “That’s very easy on any social networking site.

“If they [children] walk into a shop, they [exploiters] would be able to see who is in their shop on Snapchat. If people share their location, it’s really easy for people to Snap you and say ‘you’ve just been in my shop five minutes ago’.

“It’s really difficult with 13, 14 and 15 year-old girls to control that.”

‘It’s about blackmail, it’s about control… it’s about coercive behaviour’

“Criminal exploitation follows very different patterns,” DRI Keenaghan added. “But it can revolve around children being used to carry drugs or supply drugs for the elders.

“It’s not just drugs, it can be all sorts. They can be utilised to carry different types of packages and the transportation of money. They’ll [the exploiters] say ‘I’ll give you that for nothing, can you just go and take that to that address for me’.

“It could be they’ve been given something on one or two occasions for nothing and then the third or fourth time they’ll say ‘you owe me for that so I now want you to do this.

“It’s about blackmail, it’s about control, it’s about coercive behaviour. It’s every possible manipulative trait that they can use to exploit children.”

DCI Keenaghan added: “There are a significant number of different grooming models that are followed. A lot of people perceive child exploitation to be adult males rolling up in cars saying ‘get in my car’. That does happen, but there are other models as well.

“You get the peer-on-peer model, which can be a young girl befriending another young girl. There’s also the girlfriend-boyfriend model, which is where the exploiter acts as though they are in a relationship with the victim or the child.

“It’s no different from an adult abusing a seven-year-old child. It’s still exploitation, but the child involved in the exploitation if you say to them ‘who is this person to you?’, they’ll say ‘oh it’s my boyfriend’. That is the start of their journey of exploitation.

“Then you have the party model, where you [the victim] get taken to a party by a friend. You’re at the party, then one minute everyone’s passing around alcohol, they pass around drugs and it appears to be free.

“You go back to the party on the third occasion and are told it’s no longer free and ‘you owe me and you owe me for the last two parties that you’ve been to’.

“They [the victims] become indebted and can’t seem to escape that. There are so many different ways children are groomed. It’s usually the very vulnerable in our community that look to people for the attention they don’t get from home.

“There are children that come from very affluent communities that may be given the money but not the attention. It’s really diverse as to who it affects and that’s why it’s really…