LIMA – The boom in social networks on the Internet has contributed to increasing disappearances of children in Lima, many of whom fall into the hands of people trafficking gangs, the Peru.21 newspaper reported.

So far this year, the disappearances of more than 600 teenagers have been reported in Lima alone, and an average of four people vanish each day, the newspaper said.

The complaints about disappearances may be as many as eight per day, on average, National Police missing persons unit chief Jose Luis Langle told the newspaper.

Since the beginning of 2009, police have counted a total of 1,278 missing persons cases, of whom 619 are teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17.

Why the rising trend? The police say that gangs involved in people trafficking are behind the disappearances.

The massive use of online social networking has become a “double-edged sword” among teenagers, Langle said.

Access to the Internet facilitates the work of gangs that seek to abduct children to put them to work as beggars, do other manual or sexual work and even supply body organs for the organ trafficking trade, the police chief said.

“Starting with fake job offers, they begin to seduce the children who, sometimes, end up being kidnapped or in the hands of organized crime groups,” Langle said.

The cases are very frequent among teenagers who intensively use Internet social networking sites, Maria Teresa Mosquea, the coordinator of the non-governmental organization Accion por los Niños, said.

The youngsters who are abducted by organized crime groups mostly come from the country’s jungle cities like Pucallpa and Huanuco, or the Andean city of Ayacucho, Mosquera said.

“Most of them, the girls and, now, the boys are forced to enter into sexual exploitation and (the traffickers) take others to work on plots of land, for example, in the south,” Mosquera said.