After going to a website listed on a bag of mandarins, Levi Finer was directed to porn sites. Photo / Simon Baker
A healthy food website promoted to children on hundreds of bags of pre-packed mandarins has turned out to be a link to hardcore pornography.
Canterbury mother-of-four Lara Finer was horrified when her 8-year-old daughter Levi stumbled across a porn menu on Monday.
She had asked her mother's permission to look up the site, which was advertised on the label of a 1kg bag of Fresh Max mandarins bought in Rangiora on May 15.
Instead of taking her to Munch Island, where children can complete interactive puzzles and read about the merits of eating fruit, Levi was confronted by links such as Hot Gay Bareback Porn and OneFreePorn DVD.
A disbelieving Finer told the Herald on Sunday her daughter clicked on a link to a website offering hardcore gay porn. "A big, cartoon, purple monster completely directed at kids then popped up, asking her to press enter if she was over 18," says Lara. "Luckily my 17-year-old saw what was happening and clicked her straight out of there."
Thinking her daughter had made a typing mistake, Finer re-entered the address, only to get the same result.
She replaced .com with .co.nz and found what Levi was looking for - "a brilliant interactive site for children".
Finer said she phoned FreshMax thinking the .com address was a misprint. She said she was told the unregistered .com site had been hacked into. The company phoned back apologising for the glitch and promising to fix the problem.
Fresh Max managing director Peter Smith said old labels had been used on one batch of mandarins by mistake and the company regretted the mistake. He said the offensive site was shut down within 24 hours.
Smith blamed cyber squatters - hackers who set up porn sites with domain names a letter or two different from those popular with children.
Smith said the company became aware of the practice three months ago after a similar incident.
Since then it had bought eight variations on the address to stop it happening again.
He said the company had been trying to buy the .com domain since the first incident and agreed a deal last week.
Lee Chisholm, of Netsafe, said that extreme violence or sex- ually explicit material was often a couple of mouse clicks or a mis-spelt word away.
Early results from Netsafe research suggested 90 per cent of year 9 students had viewed porn online. It recommended software filters and close parental supervision.
A free download available at netsafe.co.nz offers young computer users an icon called Hector's Button. Used in many primary schools, it teaches children to click on a swimming dolphin on the com- puter screen if they come across anything that upsets them.
Chisholm said the screen would immediately be replaced with an underwater scene featuring Hector and a message tell- ing the child to get an adult.
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