Buried in 800,000 pages of Epstein records, investigators and citizen watchdogs have begun to piece together something almost too disturbing to believe: a coded language built from the most ordinary symbols on our phones. “Cheese” and “pizza” emojis, sent casually across platforms, reportedly became signals for the trading of sexually explicit images of minors, allowing predators to speak in public while remaining effectively invisible. For India, the London parent who founded ProtectPD, the horror wasn’t abstract; it was seeing predators harvest innocent family photos from open social media accounts and turn them into currency.

As the files expose Epstein’s web of billionaires, celebrities, and royals, the full scale of complicity and proximity is still unclear. But the warning is not. Experts like John Carr OBE say the first line of defense is painfully simple: lock down your accounts, think before you post, and remember that once a child’s image is online, you cannot control who is looking—or why.