a Child Safety Alert many of you have
used or maybe seen those fun filters
featured on snapchat but behind the cute
dog faces and the gender swap filters
snapchat is also being used as a
business it's called premium snapchat
and it has some making thousands of
dollars selling explicit pictures in
videos through the app consumer
investigator Lauren burner is joining us
now with a warning to make sure that
kids aren't getting involved on this app
Lauren our investigation into this
premium snapchat feature it was shocking
to see how easy it was to subscribe to
one of these porn pages and yes that's
what we're calling it but what might
have been worse is how many of these
users actually promote being underage
take a look just type the words premium
snapchat into sites like Twitter and
Instagram and what looks like the wanted
ads for porn is what pops up then you
can message them and they will tell you
what they're selling and they have
different packages and one discovery
investigator Scott Bailey breaking the
lingo down for us you'll see 7 and 7 so
7 and 7 for 20 so you get 7 videos 7
pictures for 20 bucks now we want to
show you just how easy it is to find one
of these snapchat premium accounts take
a look I'm selling nudes videos premium
snapchat Skype or sexting sessions
hashtag premium snapchat and this one we
found pretty tame compared to many of
the others we saw people have figured
out that they can offer basically their
own porn channel their own porn website
not to have to pay anybody they don't
have to you know throw up hardware and
software and manage websites and things
like that they just run it through
snapchat paying for these pictures and
videos just as easy most users take
venmo PayPal Apple pay and even Amazon
gift cards and the users are making
serious cash there's people out there
that are making $130 an hour you know
doing this some of them that are making
you know $1,000 a month's but who are
the people sending these videos and most
importantly are they adults
you certainly go out there and look at
them and say oh my gosh some of these
certainly look like teenagers some of
these snapchatters even flaunting how
young they are using hashtags like
jailbait to entice people to buy I can
tell you that we've worked digital
forensic cases that resulted in sexually
explicit material of children and I mean
you're talking kids as young as you know
seven eight
but there is no question about it having
these explicit pictures of minors is
illegal so what has been the most
shocking part of your entire
investigation I think from my standpoint
as a parent is how easy this can be done
how easy the kids can do this and how
completely clueless parents can be that
this is even occurring so here's what
parents can do to make sure their child
is not using this app and appropriately
first of all make sure your child
doesn't have two accounts one they use
for friends and family and one for well
work and also take a look at how many
snapchat points they have if it's a very
high number like a million that's a red
flag and you know that's super hard to
look at you know start questioning your
child how many points do you have but a
million more than likely not just
friends and family yeah so Lauren what
does snapchat what do they have to say
about all this stuff that doesn't
prohibit it as you could imagine
they say all accounts will be taken down
if they find out any porn has been
distributed and if the company is aware
of any inappropriate content they can
remove it and terminate the account but
again we're talking about millions of
users it's almost impossible to monitor
every single one and it's always a
really uncomfortable conversation with
his birth it's so important to be
involved and even just the conversations
with you guys many people in this
newsroom newsrooms didn't know about it
and now you have to have this
conversation with your kids well parents
are paying for the phones pay for the
bill they should control it yep look out
for it thanks Lauren