‘Sweetie’ – Fighting crime with digital smoke and mirrors.

In collaboration with the international children’s rights group Terre des Hommes, Dutch digital agency Lemz went online with a lifelike, digitally animated persona named ‘Sweetie’ in a bid to track down child sex predators.

What impressed me most about this project was the ability to proactively police and identify suspects through using publicly available online circumstantial evidence, including handles on Skype and profiles on social networks.

The project generated seriously impressive results with awareness raised among over a billion people globally and helped in tracking down 1000 potential offenders from 71 different countries.