A Facebook page sharing local Snapchat photos emerged this week and has attracted a police warning.
The page ‘Busselton Snapchats’ has already attracted 566 ‘likes’ since it was founded on Monday.
On Wednesday a number of screenshots had been posted, including one of a half-naked girl, who appeared to be under-age.
The photo has now been deleted.
Senior Sergeant Steve Principe from Busselton police warned users of the page that people sharing photos could be opening themselves to child exploitation charges.
“It is an offense to send offensive or sexualised photos of children on the internet or over any device,” he said.
“If you’re passing on photos of people under 16 years of age you could be faced child exploitation charges and end up on the sex offender register.
“With things like Snapchat you don’t know where these photos will end up, or who will view them.
“You wouldn’t let someone come into your bedroom and see you in a state of undress, so why would you share these photos?”
Snapchat is a photo sharing program that displays photos on the receiver’s phone for a limited number of seconds before being deleted.
Snapchat uses can however get around the deletion process by taking a screen shot of their phone while the photo is displayed.
When a screenshot is taken of a Snapchat photo a message is sent to the sender to alert them.
