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.