New elements are emerging in the death of little Lyhanna, whose body was found at the beginning of June. According to revelations from Le Monde, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a leading American organization in the fight against child crime, had several times reported the main suspect, Jérôme B., to the French authorities.
Established in the United States in 1984, in response to several high-profile child abduction cases, NCMEC is primarily funded by the United States Department of Justice. “Since 1984, we have helped find more than 480,000 missing children,” assures the organization on its website.
Photos, videos, exchanges by messages… Each year, the NCMEC receives millions of reports of content of sexual abuse of minors via its CyberTipline platform. “At first, we only had about 100 a week,” says Michelle DeLaune, senior vice president and chief operating officer of NCMEC, in an article on Google’s security blog. “In 2021, we received around 70,000 per day. Some of them come from the public, but the majority are sent by tech companies. » She explains this increase in reports “by the measures that the latter voluntarily deploy to proactively identify, delete and report this content. »
NCMEC does not conduct legal investigations itself. Its mission consists of receiving, structuring, enriching and prioritizing reports, particularly when a child appears to be in immediate danger or a victim has been located. In addition to content or exchanges of a child pornography nature, the organization also brings together information on the adults behind the acts. This is rarely a complete identity, but rather technical data, such as an IP address, email, pseudonym or telephone number. It is this information which is then transmitted to the authorities of the countries concerned.
In France, CyberTipline reports are mainly transmitted to the Minors Office (Ofmin), a specialized department of the judicial police responsible for combating violence against minors. This also carries out an initial sorting of the files. But faced with the mass of reports received, Ofmin only has around forty investigators, compared to the 85 promised when it was created, recalls Le Monde.
Automatic platform detections
This information is also “accessible to the territorial police and gendarmerie services if they make a request for screening concerning one of their suspects”, details the daily. A procedure that does not always work: in the absence of a civil status identity recorded by the NCMEC, it would be necessary to be able to seize the computer equipment of the person targeted by the investigation.
A large part of these reports come from automatic detections by the platforms. A single user can generate multiple reports, and the same content can be reported multiple times. According to the Global Platform for Child Exploitation Policy page, managed by the NCMEC, the main reporting platforms in France are the social networks TikTok (52,000 reports in 2025), then Snapchat (37,000) and Instagram (24,000). Among the contents reported are mainly images with child pornography content (250,000) then videos (210,000).
In 2023, a report from the organization led to the arrest in France and Europe of around thirty men suspected of having used child pornography content via Signal messaging. In 2025, another alert made it possible to identify and arrest a 55-year-old man in the north of France, suspected of having ordered and paid for hundreds of rapes of children by families in Colombia.
