 Every now and then a story comes across my desk that has a happy ending, but starts off in a pretty horrendous light. Now you guys know that we are a Nintendo channel, so most of what we focus on has to do with Nintendo content. We'll throw in an occasional Xbox, PlayStation, PC gaming, or industry story, but for the most part we focus on the upcoming game releases, the next platforms or future platform revisions, but sometimes a good but sad story at the same time comes across my desk that deals with Nintendo and we're not talking about like employee abuse or anything like that. What we're actually talking about today is how a child's life was inadvertently saved thanks to not only the efforts of a friend, but the efforts of tracking data provided by Nintendo through somebody's Nintendo switch. That's right, because a child who was kidnapped had their Nintendo switch. They were able to be located and saved from a horrendous situation. This really hits home for me as somebody with three children including someone right around this age. It's one of my greatest fears is that someone will try to kidnap and abuse one of my children. So here is the story. This is over here on GameSpot where it says FBI uses Nintendo switch data to find a missing girl 2000 miles away from home. That's long ways away. Scary. All right posted by Jason Finnelli on July 17th. The article goes on to say a recent missing person's case in Virginia was solved thanks to an unconventional tool as the federal Bureau of Investigation revealed a Nintendo switch was used to locate a missing 15-year-old girl and return her to her family. According to court documents obtained by ABC 15 in Arizona, the girl whose name had not been disclosed due to her status as a minor had disappeared from her home on August 3rd, 2022. After attempts to find her in the neighborhood failed, a friend noticed the girl's Nintendo switch online account was showing recent activity and alerted the authorities. The girl had befriended a then 28-year-old man named Ethan Roberts on the internet. Roberts traveled to Virginia to meet the minor, then brought her with him to his home in Tolesan, Arizona and eventually forced her into child pornography. As the courtroom documents revealed, Roberts allowed her to bring her Nintendo switch on the trip and when she connected it to the internet to watch YouTube and download a game, a friend notified the police of her online status. After an inquiry from Nintendo turned up Roberts' IP address, authorities were able to find his apartment and arrest him 11 days after her disappearance. It's probably nothing that anybody even thought of it at this point. Retired Arizona Department of Public Safety Director Frank Milstead said to ABC 15, the fact that somebody else down the road, another child was bright enough to go, hey look, my friend is online and she's been missing and I need to tell somebody. Roberts was indicted in federal court on multiple charges which included child pornography and transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. After a plea deal, he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Now for starters, really happy that this child was found and brought home and whenever I see stories like this because the unfortunate reality is child kidnapping, convincing a teenager that it's okay to come with me and life's going to be so much better and as a parent stories like this are just heartbreaking but also in this particular case it has a positive ending and credits to Nintendo for giving IP address information based on tracking data Nintendo has from her online access on the switch. I do feel that as parents, one thing that I'm often criticized for when anything about me as a parent comes out because I don't quite have someone who's 15, my oldest daughter turns 13 this year, then I have an eight year old and a 10 year old. The biggest thing I get criticized by some often younger people and their whether they're teenagers or early 20s is how much I pay attention to my kids and who they're talking to. The fact that I know all of the access to all of my children's phones that I know all the logins to all their accounts whether it's Snapchat or Facebook Messenger or yada yada yada that I have access to everything and while I don't sit there and hawk over my children non-stop every single damn day it is something that I do check once in a while not because I really care what they're talking about and to be fair some of the conversations I've seen my kids have are just weird they're just weird silly things that kids talk about it is something that well I don't want to pry into their you know quote unquote private lives what I'm trying to actually look for are the warning signs of predators because this is the reality that we're growing up in now that my parents didn't have to deal with when I was a kid there were child predators back then and what we had to worry about was people pulling up on the side of the road offering us candy to get into a van that might still be a thing that happens especially around playgrounds or something or schoolyards I don't know but it seems more and more that we're hearing these stories of teenagers and younger children being basically talking to someone online and choosing to meet up with them which makes it so much easier for the nefarious actions to end up happening I find this to be an interesting situation that we're growing up in this world of technology I mean a Nintendo switch just led to the recovery of a minor and preventing further harm to her who knows if she's scarred of anything right now or what you know what else potentially happened beyond some child pornography photos or something but I I'm just it's alarming to me how few parents in my opinion really pay attention to their children's activities especially online I understand in the world of wanting to provide privacy and letting children have their own lives I don't need to know about all the intimate conversations you're having with your close friends but also your close friends are not really the people I'm worried about the red flags pop up to me when it's somebody who doesn't live around here or when it's somebody who I've never heard of and isn't listed on your class list or any school list that I can find anywhere that starts to really ring the alarm bells when you're talking to complete strangers on the internet who claim to be something that they're not and I didn't grow up in this era where my parents had to worry about that as much we did have like AOL and Yahoo chat rooms and stuff like that but uh it wasn't that bad and it was almost like I had you know I didn't have a phone right there wasn't I didn't have this level of access to that stuff it was limited time frames a couple times a week on on a computer and gosh knows maybe my dad was checking all the chat logs so maybe he knew anyways I I do think that um we need to be much more careful with our children much more protective not overprotective to the point where we don't let our children have lives but protective enough though that we can at least become aware if someone enters our child's life uh even if it's just online that we are that we need to have our warning flags of what maybe even maybe even just conversations with our children as they get older about such things um you know we're very fortunate in this situation that this particular person that that kidnapped her did allow her to bring her switch obviously I'm presuming that he presented a friendly front he himself probably looks a little bit younger because you could still look pretty young at 28 there's plenty of people I know that are 30 years old that could pass for a teenager so I could see how maybe this person looks a bit younger sounds really trustworthy says all the right things of course they're going to let you bring your switch the the weird part of course is I presume this 15 year old must have had a cell phone or something and that wasn't allowed to come with or at least this person was smart enough to turn it off or or whatever the case might be and prevent internet access I I do find it interesting how these situations come up and what's what's really uh what really hits me up with this story I mean this person's 15 they're not some little baby kid uh but what doesn't change about minors from my experience anyways is that they're easily manipulated and at 15 16 17 even 18 uh I remember being that age and thinking I knew everything I knew better than my parents I knew everything you couldn't tell me what to do I knew it all everyone else is wrong and I am right it's very much an attitude a lot of teenagers have so they don't want to listen to the parents they don't want to listen to their peers they don't want to listen uh to teachers because I know better you're just an idiot you didn't grow up in my era you don't know and what happens is they become extremely manipulated by people who are older and it's it's a very unfortunate situation again I'm really glad the story turned out in the positive but I just kind of want to put the message out there that parents we need to be more aware of what our children are doing regardless if they get mad at us about it uh guess what it's okay we're not there to be our children's friends we're there to help them get to adulthood hopefully have them learn the things they need to learn along the way to have a good life and lead a good life and honestly you know there are some parents although the firm of the blue hey if my child hates me then I'm probably doing something right because why do they hate you probably because you're trying to protect them and they're not going to understand that until you're older there are things my parents did to me growing up in a completely different era that I never understood and I got angry about and I argue with them about then now that I'm a parent and I'm you know in my mid to late 30s I now understand what my parents were doing and I have an appreciation that they did that for me that I didn't have back then and I try to remind that myself like that of me like when I'm take grounding my kids from tablets or other things or not letting them go do some fun things because they did something wrong or broke the rules I try to remind myself that as much as I want to give in and as much as that it's okay that my children are mad at the moment because when they're older they too will be able to look back on this and be thankful that they're you know that we protected them from certain situations or that we were teaching them lessons about things that we're going to need to use later in life so you guys do what you want to do am I here to tell anyone how to parent this is just what I do but I'm really glad this situation turned out well and whoever you are hopefully this girl learned a valuable lesson about just trusting strangers on the internet I mean you can't you don't know them you just don't I don't know any of you that's why I don't give you enough information to do anything to ferry us with thank you guys for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video