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New Mexico Attorney General Ral Torrez joined alongside the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and multiple local law enforcement held a news conference on the arrests and charges of eight suspected child predators in New Mexico on Monday, Oct. 14. Currently, there is a warrant for a ninth arrest. “Operation Overwatch” is an undercover online chat investigation spearheaded by the New Mexico Department of Justice. View the suspected child predators and charges hereStephen Charles Phillips, Albuquerque Middle School TeacherCount 1: Sexual exploitation of children by prostitution (hires) (attempt)Count 2: Criminal sexual penetration attempt (child under 13)MORE: Albuquerque police crackdown on ‘vigilantes’ attempting to catch suspected child predators According to NMDOJ, all eight have been charged with crimes, including child solicitation via electronic devices, attempted criminal sexual penetration and other related offenses. Each defendant had sought to engage in sexual activity with a minor.”Operation Overwatch, which just last week culminated in the arrest of eight individual suspects and the issuance of an additional arrest warrant for individuals who were engaged with undercover agents from several different agencies,” Torrez said during Monday’s news conference. “Not only our agents here at DOJ, but also the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Homeland Security Investigations, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office and Santa Fe Police Department, the Albuquerque Police Department over the last several weeks, various agents working in an undercover capacity establish decoy accounts on a number of different, nontraditional, digital platforms and digital messaging services,” Torrez said.Accounts used in operation from online platformsKikSkiptheGamesMocoSpaceDiscordGrindrFetlifeSniffies”What they were able to do was establish both underage personas and presented themselves as either minor children or as adults, usually parents who were offering to traffic children for sex. As a result, they were able to initiate contact with several suspects,” Torrez said. “Parents need to be mindful about what is going on with their kids and specifically who they are communicating with on video game platforms, and virtual spaces, every internet platform and social media application that they have.””I hope this is really a kind of a wakeup call to all these predators that come and prey on our children, our most vulnerable. Whether you’re within the state or outside of the state, there is no good reason to ever go after our most vulnerable,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Raul Bujanda said. “Every year, thousands of children become victims of crimes, whether it’s through kidnappings, violent attacks, sexual abuse, human trafficking or online predators. Today is another important example of law enforcement’s commitment to bringing child predators to justice and disrupt all forms of exploitation,” Bujanda said.”These cases are sickening. The disappointing thing is, we know there’s more of you out there. And as you can see, we’re a fortified front here, standing in front of you. We are looking for you. We will find you. We know that you can’t help yourself. So, we’re going to make sure that we protect our most vulnerable, which is our children,” Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said during Monday’s news conference.Faith Egbuonu: What message does this send for vigilante groups? Oftentimes, the lines are blurred.AG Ral Torrez: That’s critically important. Not just in this context, but in every context. The men here in uniform are highly trained and specially trained to deal with complex criminal investigations. Vigilantism has no place in our criminal justice system at all.It has no place in our society in terms of untrained cowboys taking it upon themselves to try and track people down. In fact, oftentimes they can not only endanger themselves, they can endanger other people, and they can also endanger strong criminal cases that we could otherwise put together and take people off the streets. So, I can’t say it strongly enough. There is no space, in any kind of vigilante activity in this operation or any other.Raul Bujanda, FBI Special Agent in Charge: The one thing Faith, I would add, we’re also 100% responsive. So, law enforcement is going to be there responding. So, we don’t need no vigilante group out there. We don’t see that really in the state of New Mexico, we’re always tracking to make sure they’re not going after this or any other type of activity. But this is something that law enforcement is going to be there 100% of the time.And I’ll even further add that some of these predators purposely don’t want their name out there. So, they use different types of pseudonyms or whatnot to try to make our job a little harder. They don’t really make it harder, but they think they’re making it harder. We’re going to find who they are. But a vigilante group might not have that information.They might actually be going up to going after someone who’s just going to be turned into a victim, because they had nothing to do with the scam itself.Albuquerque police Cmdr. Kyle Hartsock: We actually charged a vigilante group back in April. They were trying to do this, but there’s the law, just to be clear, only allows law enforcement to pretend to be a child in terms of charging someone. So, as they correctly stated, and we pointed out if this really was an offender you were catching, we can never charge them now.That’s all you’ve done. In many cases, they were entrapment, and they were going after very low IQ individuals it wasn’t necessarily even clear if they were actually trying to commit this issue. They were doing it for likes on Instagram. So, we charged four individuals with it back in April. Wanted to point that out. We send a strong message against that. Call police, call FBI, submit a tip online. Law enforcement works these cases every day.Faith Egbuonu: I know you all specified how important it is for parents to be involved with their children. For those that don’t have parents or guardians, how do we combat that? For kids that don’t have that guidance that are often taken advantage of. AG Ral Torrez: One of the initiatives that’s underway at the New Mexico Department of Justice is called the Smart Chats Program, where we are actually working with, school districts and educators across the state, both to get a baseline understanding from young people about what applications they’re on, what social media they’re using, what devices they use to communicate with people.We take in that information and process, and then we go back and talk to the leadership at the school, not only about specific ways they can engage with young people at the school to be more proactive and in sort of safeguarding their information and protecting themselves online, but to just raise the awareness level within educational institutions, because outside of the home, we think that schools are probably the next best place for us to engage, in that kind of public awareness and education. That said, Smart Chats is something that we are willing to partner with other civic groups, youth sports. Lots of different communities, based activities and organizations can reach out to us, Boy Scout troops and the like. We are happy to go in contact and work with leadership there to see if we can help raise some awareness with people.Jason T. Stevens, Homeland Security Investigations (El Paso): For Homeland Security Investigations, we have a federal campaign is called KNO2 Protect. It’s a federal campaign where we’ve also partnered with Snapchat, and we’ve created a lens for Snapchat. So, it can kind of create a quiz or interactive tool for, I want to say, young children or teens that are using that.It also allows parents to kind of facilitate that conversation by asking certain questions. The KNO2Protect campaign is something that they can go online and look for. They can use a Snapchat tool and hopefully that will enable them in some of those conversations.Note: KOAT is currently investigating the Albuquerque teacher’s school of employment Stay updated on the latest news updates with the KOAT app. You can download it here.