“Authorities Rescue Girl Whose Mother Livestreamed Her Sexual Abuse”, The New York Times
The 9-year-old from Vietnam was abused by her mother for customers watching on smartphone apps in the U.S. and elsewhere. The mother said she needed the money.
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Michael H. Keller has been investigating online child sexual abuse for years and recently focused on parental involvement in the exploitation.
June 27, 2025
A 9-year-old Vietnamese girl who was sexually abused by her mother for customers watching on smartphone apps in the United States and elsewhere has been rescued and her mother arrested, according to U.S. authorities.
The abuse, which a man in Utah recorded from a livestream feed after paying to watch it on his iPhone, was reported by The New York Times in December as part of an investigation into the role mothers play in the online exploitation of their underage daughters. Officials at that time said a rescue mission was in progress, but they only now announced that it had been successfully completed.
The woman, whose name was not released, used multiple apps available in the Apple and Google stores, including the video chat platforms Bigo Live and BuzzCast as well as WhatsApp. The woman also created made-to-order videos for customers, according to Tanya Roman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Law enforcement officials in Vietnam did not respond to a request for comment.
The woman lived in rural Vietnam and told the authorities that she “needed the money,” Ms. Roman said. The girl is now in state care, and her mother has been charged with raping a person under 16 years old and production of child sexual abuse material, according to Homeland Security. If convicted, she faces a sentence of 20 years to life in prison.
The authorities are waiting to obtain access to the woman’s phone, which they expect will contain valuable leads on her American buyers. The man from Utah told The Times that he paid $550 for the mother and another woman he contacted online to sexually abuse their daughters. He later reported the sessions to the Canadian Center for Child Protection, which verified the abuse to The Times.
“The No. 1 offending country is the United States,” said an undercover agent with Homeland Security, who was involved in the case and spoke on the condition that he not be named to protect his ability to do his work. “They’re the ones paying for this abuse.”
The Times’s investigation in December found children — including the Vietnamese girl, who was 8 at the time — being advertised on more than 80 adult dating apps. Though Apple and Google later removed or suspended the apps, adults continued to find ways to profit off the children and cater to men, predominantly in Western countries, who pay to watch children be sexually abused.
Over the course of months, the undercover agent posed as a potential customer and corresponded with the Vietnamese mother over Telegram and WhatsApp. He later worked with the Vietnamese authorities to arrest her and rescue the daughter in April.
“The comfort in which the child was acting in these obviously abusive situations would indicate that she had been groomed for quite some time,” the agent said. “I asked the mother about that, and she said she had taught her. She trained her.”
The problem of on-demand, livestreamed abuse illustrates a dark side of how technology is connecting parents and predators and how new video platforms catering to the so-called creator economy are making it easier to facilitate payments between the two. In his 12 years investigating these crimes, the agent said, it was common for men to find women on adult sex sites and to offer them more money for access to their children.
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People who are “destitute now all of a sudden have a means to provide for themselves because of the internet,” he said. “They’re selling themselves, and way too many times that leads to selling children, too.”
The arrest and rescue in Vietnam marked the first successful infiltration by the American authorities of an abusive livestreaming operation in that country, Ms. Roman, the spokeswoman said, and the first time Vietnamese officials successfully investigated such a case. The agent said that he expected the case would lead to “a significant infiltration of trafficking networks” in Vietnam, and that an investigation of another woman was underway.
Prior efforts had focused mostly on the Philippines, where the problem is thought to be most common, but the global scale is not well documented. One human rights group estimated that nearly 500,000 Filipino children had been abused in the creation of illegal imagery.
Lloyd Richardson, a director at the Canadian center whose team verified the Utah man’s video, said that it was heartening to hear of the child’s rescue but noted that imagery of the abuse would live on long after it had ended.
In a search this week, he found multiple videos of the mother sexually abusing the girl available for sale on forums that distribute such material. The center’s systems regularly scan for known imagery and issue takedown notices.
“It becomes very difficult to get rid of once it’s out there,” he said, “but it’s absolutely important to remove as much of this material as we can.”
Damien Cave and Albert Nguyen contributed reporting from Vietnam.
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Michael H. Keller is a Times reporter who combines traditional reporting and computer programming. His work has examined technology’s impact on society and shortcomings of the criminal justice system.