A new government agency launched to tackle child abuse on the web has received its first credible reports of possible offences.

The website of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) went live only last night, but the agency has already received a high volume of calls this morning regarding potential offences - with the first credible report at 8am today.

Calls to the Internet Watch Foundation, a watchdog that informs internet service providers of illegal activity, were also up by 20 per cent this morning.

The CEOP centre, which will operate 24 hours a day, is the first of its kind in the UK to bring together police, computer industry experts and child welfare representatives to tackle issues such as online grooming and child abuse images.

Its chief executive, Jim Gamble, warned paedophiles they should "get help or get caught" because the internet was no longer seen as "unpoliceable".

Mr Gamble, former Deputy Director General of the National Crime Squad, said that the centre would focus on an intelligence-led approach monitoring what sexual offenders are doing, tracking their financial transactions and their travel.

"For too long in the past we were playing catch-up all the time. But now, when the criminal gets the next version of software, the industry that invents it will have already delivered that technology to us.

"The CEOP centre is the most significant development in child protection in recent years and is a direct response to the explosion in online child abuse. What we have to understand is that behind every image online there is a child in the real world being abused," he said.

Mugshots of convicted paedophiles who have escaped into the community could also be posted on the internet to warn people.

The unit, with a budget of £5 million a year, will see police proactively target paedophiles by pretending to be children themselves in chat rooms. Mr Gamble said he hoped to get support worth £1 million form the private sector in CEOP’s first year, both in cash and in kind.

With the massive scope of the internet, the real level of child grooming online is still an unknown, but police hope that within a few months of operation the new agency will be able to identify just how big the problem is.

The CEOP centre is based on work pioneered by the FBI which began combating child exploitation on the internet with undercover agents working online to find child predators.

Eight years ago the FBI began the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children which has found that one in five children will be solicited while on the internet.

Following revelations in the US, the UK launched Operation Ore in 2002, which pinpointed the need for a centralised resource to tackle the problem.

Sarah Robertson of the Internet Watch Foundation said that it would continue to deal with illegal online content, and the new CEOP centre would take control of issues such as illegal behaviour, like grooming in chatrooms.

"The Internet Watch Foundation will continue its role taking reports from the public about illegal content – child abuse images as well as criminally racist and obscene material,’’ she said. "It then works with the industry to have those websites taken down and will pass intelligence about the illegal material to the new CEOP Centre to be further investigated."

Neil Thompson, a security expert from Red 24 who has spent 30 years in the police force and dealt extensively with advising families about online grooming, urged parents to take note of any change in their child’s demeanour.

"If a child has been given a pornographic magazine, it is something tangible, something parents can see, but with the internet, there is so much you can’t see. A lot of time when children are online it is inaccessible to the parents, they don’t know.

"The internet is the easiest tool for this murky world to exist." He said parents need to speak often to their children about the dangers of chatrooms and the risk of meeting up with strangers.

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