Detective Inspector Jon Rouse, head of Queensland police's Taskforce Argos – set up to investigate online child abuse – said four crack teams of undercover officers and analysts trained to catch internet paedophiles are tracking predators in real time who share depraved material.

Police insist the move means Queenslanders who share videos and images via peer-to-peer file-sharing applications such as BitTorrent or Tor are running out of places to hide.

“We’ve been able to create a ‘fingerprint’ of all the images of the sexual abuse of children that we see online,” Inspector Rouse said.

“And we can track the movement of that fingerprint across these platforms.

“This means we can monitor the movement of anyone sharing child-exploitation material across these particular software applications.”

From there, police can generate unique IP (internet provider) addresses which alert authorities to the home or workplace the material is being produced at or sent from, and who is receiving it.

One of the IP hotspot maps seen by Fairfax shows hundred of dots concentrated along the coastline of the entire eastern seaboard, with the biggest Queensland cluster centred on Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.

“We know what they are exchanging,” Inspector Rouse said.

“They are facilitating the distribution of child-abuse material.”

He added police looked for “commonalities” in file-sharing that indicated someone was a bigger threat than they may first have appeared.

“For example, it may not be child-abuse material they’re exchanging – it might be a 180-page PDF that teaches [someone] how to access and groom a child,” he said.

“If they’re sharing that, we consider they might be a greater threat, and we’ll put additional resources into that.”

It is understood that police can identify most offenders, about 70 per cent, who live-stream the abuse of children – but the identification rate drops dramatically when monitoring the exchange of images or videos.

Inspector Rouse refused to comment on the statistical claims, or provide details of the level of evidence that needs to be obtained to achieve successful prosecutions for operational reasons.

“What I will say is we are constantly, religiously full-time on peer-to-peer file-sharing systems - we’ve got dedicated teams doing that work,” he said.

“We brought down two of the biggest child-abuse boards in the world on Tor.

“These people think that they’re safe. They’re not. Bring it on.”

Taskforce Argos is also cracking down on Queenslanders who pay for the sexual abuse of children in the Philippines.

Inspector Rouse would not be drawn on the precise numbers of Queenslanders involved, saying there were “an increasing number” who were paying to view the live streamed rape and torture of children.

“Primarily [what we are doing] is a disruption strategy,” he said.

“What [we] do is try to stop the money leaving the country that’s financing it,” he said.

“We’re very active with other agencies monitoring what’s going into the Philippines and we’re focused on the Australians, particularly the Queenslanders, who are funding this.

“We look at the Australian transactions going into the Philippines, and then we have to work with the Australian Federal Police liaison officer in the country.

“We also work with International Justice Mission (IJM), the Philippine National Police and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to assist in the prosecution of people doing this, and the identification of the victims.

“What the internet has done is make it clear to the world, this problem is a little bit bigger than we thought it was.”

Inspector Rouse said paedophiles who lured children and teens into meeting up with them in person had been going on since the start of the internet.

“I first encountered this 18 years ago when we were dealing with dial-up modems,” he explained.

“Since then, we’ve had multiple instances where children have met people in person [who groomed them] online.

“All children are vulnerable to online grooming if they are using applications that facilitate communication.

“Both boys and girls are equally at risk, however, boys are less likely to report incidents."

Eleven years ago, Sonya Ryan’s 15-year-old daughter Carly became the first Australian murdered by an online predator.

About 18 months before her death, the schoolgirl was befriended online by serial paedophile Garry Francis Newman, who pretended be a teenage musician from Melbourne named “Brandon Kane”.

In January 2007, Newman travelled from Melbourne to visit Carly at her home in South Australia, posing as “Shane”, the father of Brandon, in order to give her presents from the non-existent Brandon.

When he told them he didn’t have a room booked, Sonya invited him to stay the night. Later she found Newman on Carly’s bed and immediately kicked him out of the house.

But several weeks later, unbeknownst to Sonya, he travelled back to Melbourne and lured Carly to a remote beach, pretending to be his non-existent son.

When the teen arrived at the beach, she was greeted by Newman, who bashed her, suffocated her in the sand and threw her into the water to drown.

Since her daughter's murder, Ms Ryan has become a tireless internet safety advocate and set up the Carly Ryan Foundation to ensure those who prey on children and teens online are brought to justice.

“We were simply no match for someone operating over 200 fake profiles online to lure children,” Ms Ryan said.

“He had multiple identities, he was luring kids all over the world.

“When they arrested him 11 days later, after Carly was found, he was online chatting to a 14-year-old girl from Perth arranging a meeting.”

Ms Ryan believes educating children in internet safety, rather than banning mobile phones from school or banning kids from devices, is the most effective weapon parents have at their disposal.

“I don’t believe in banning anything, it’s about reducing the ability of a criminal to access a child,” she said.

“It’s not the internet that’s bad, it’s the people who get on it to take advantage of others.

“It’s about listening to your instincts. Mums and dads can’t be looking over their child’s shoulder the whole time.”

Ms Ryan said parents also needed to educate themselves on the apps their children and teens are downloading.

“Remember – you are paying for and providing the device and the internet, probably until they are 18,” she said.

“While you’re providing that, it is a privilege, not a right and to be given that kind of responsibility, [families] need to have some kind of agreement in place.”

Explaining to children that it’s their responsibility to make sure they are not sharing private information about their family, exposing their home location, reduces the risk of harm, she explained.

“As soon as you hand that device over, parents should make sure that there’s a password to download any app.

“Learn all about it; learn about privacy settings, turn off location settings for that particular app, do all those things and then your child can go and use it effectively.

“We also need to build critical thinking for young people, resilience, emotional intelligence skills.

“Because, if we build those skills in young people, they will be able to question what they’re seeing, and question the person that says, ‘hey beautiful’ or ‘hey handsome’ and recognise that this person may not have good intentions towards them.”

For more information on the Carly Ryan Foundation, go to carlyryanfoundation.com