UK - A schoolboy posed as a female British secret service spy in an internet chatroom to persuade a friend to try to murder him, a court heard yesterday. The boy, John, now 15, groomed a 16-year-old boy, Mark (both pseudonyms to protect the children), with an "elaborate matrix of deceit" involving six fictional characters in the MSN chatroom and correspondence totalling 56,000 lines of text.
The fictions created by John, then 14, convinced Mark that he was murdering someone who had a terminal brain tumour.
He was told that his reward would be money, a job as a British secret service agent and sex with the spy, whom he believed was a middle-aged woman.
In fact, John was determined to get himself killed, which is why he never used the abort code - 6969 - he provided. (more... much more)
