Strategies:

There is only one main strategy to prevent the dangers of predators on virtual worlds-- they gain access to victim's names, their ages, and even their addresses by simply asking for them while trying to be trustworthy. The only thing people can do to prevent attacks is to never share any personal information with anyone they meet in any chatting game. It's as simple as remembering that one rule. Parents should talk to their children about the dangers of online chatting and let them know the risk of giving away any trackable personal information.

With intentions like theirs, predators can track someone down easily with only small key pieces of information. Giving away things like your address or your full name and your province or state is asking for problems. As long as people learn to get this rule down and keep their personal information personal, there's no other tracking way for a predator-- people are safe from harm.

Hazzards

While entertaining to many around the world, such a factor proves to be dangerous-- Virtual Worlds can be accessed by anyone with internet. In a way, virtual worlds are a great deal more dangerous than mere chatrooms-- Users are able to create an outward appearance for themselves, which can be incredibly misleading to others they are speaking to.

Online predators with immoral intentions can easily mislead young victims into thinking they look like whatever they've designed for their character, drawing people in with a fake, pixelated appearance to make victims trust them. A predator can easily, for example, persuade a naive internet surfer to give their information, perhaps because they seem like a nice person or because their user appearance appeals to the victim. It's not long before the pedophile has, at least, the victim's email-- in some cases, with enough misleading, the predator can have received the girl's name, age, even address.

There have been many cases of online users being tracked down by their predators from information received, given away because the victim either trusted the predator, or was naive enough to give away their personal information.

In virtual worlds, users are looking around for someone young to get onto webcam with, get the address, track their victims down. There have been cases where a victim's "seventeen year old friend" from some sort of virtual game turned up at their door older than the victim's father.

Such facts are the reason why children need to be warned and educated about what they give away online, to complete strangers trying to mask their bad intentions by appealing to the victim. If a lot of the victims had been warned of the dangers of chatrooms, the world could have been spared assaults and even murders.

Introduction

Virtual Worlds share many similarities with virtual bulletin boards, more commonly known as chat rooms. They share links in that both are a source of chatting with people all across the world, where all that have access to the internet are able to communicate with each other through virtual means. Complete strangers can exchange age, gender, location, and even photos of themselves depending on how much they trust the individual, something that is easy gained during chat room sessions.

Communication is the main similarity between virtual worlds and basic chat room systems, but there are vast differences that set the two apart.

For one, Virtual Worlds host gaming systems, where players can customize their appearance and create a character for themselves to use while exploring the areas of their choice, choosing to let the customized image represent themselves. Interacting with others with a distinct appearance proves to be more fun for participants than if they were to enter a chat room, and makes things more personal between members of the virtual society. An example of such a place would be Habbo Hotel, a popular virtual website in which each member signs up and creates a pixilated human of their choice, male or female, and customize the clothes and physical features of their decided Habbo.

There are many Virtual Worlds designed for many ages, some targeted towards young children such as the well-known “Neopets”, while others have an age requirement, requiring all members to be thirteen and above to join the community due to its content.