As a mother and Vice President of Development for the Invictus Project, Whitney Miller said there was no way she could ignore child exploitation.
“This is a fight for my children, but it's a fight for every other child that stands alongside my child, because this is something that you know to see it and know it means you can no longer turn a blind eye to it,” Miller said.
The Invictus Project is a nonprofit organization that supports the Invictus Task Force — a multiagency uniting Randolph, Alamance, Davidson and Forsyth County Sheriff's Offices with Homeland Security Investigations and the State Bureau of Investigation. The task force works to protect children from sexual exploitation and trafficking.
The project supports law enforcement with funding technology and tools — such as data-extraction software Cellebrite Mobile Forensics and Magnet GrayKey — needed to work cases. Miller also said the project works on the educational side, educating the community about predator behaviors while law enforcement deals with the behaviors.
However, funding is raised entirely by the community, with donations coming from people wanting to get involved.
“I think what it is, is once our community hears and understands the magnitude of the problem, what's happening in our own backyard, they feel compelled to find a way to do something about it,” Miller said.
According to data from the Invictus Project’s website, 1 in 5 children have admitted to being contacted by or solicited by an online predator — and there are 84.9 million known images of child sexual abuse material being traded on the internet.
Miller said that much of the project’s funding comes from small, local grants, individual donors plus parents who recognize their children are vulnerable.
“They want to find a way to help move the mission ahead and help other parents be aware of what these concerns are and what's happening,” Miller said.
With events such as Teens: It’s Time to Talk, and It’s Time to Talk, the project has educated the Alamance County community with two events in the past month on the importance of monitoring children’s technology and building a bridge between communication with parents around topics that tend to be very difficult. The events give the community a safe space to begin conversations around what they see online and how predators connect with youth, according to Miller.
Informational handouts for the Invictus Task Force sit on a table during the "It's Time to Talk" event on Jan. 20.
Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson said child predators are a concern in communities across North Carolina, including Alamance County, but the task force works to catch individuals through undercover operations. He said the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office provides two full-time officers to the task force.
“Right now, our county and the counties in North Carolina have a ton of predators,” Johnson said. We also have a lot of predators from out of state making contact, trying to pose as a young boy, wanting to meet a young girl, et cetera. We're trying to stay on top of it, the best we can. Just like in January, we arrested 23 sexual predators just here in Alamance County. And there's plenty more out there that we're still working on.”
The Alamance County Sheriff’s Office’s Invictus Task Force arrested 23 individuals during a two-week-long operation they titled “Operation Ghost Wire” from Oct. 13 through Oct. 24, 2025. According to the press release, the individuals who were arrested “either traveled with the intent to engage in sexual contact with a minor, solicited sexual contact from whom they believed to be a minor child and/or were uploading or downloading child sex abuse material.”
The project offers a service for teens called “Take it Down,” a resource that helps teens remove online nude, partially nude or sexually explicit photos and videos taken before they were 18. Johnson said the project raises awareness of child exploitation and the risks associated with social media.
“These kids get on that computer, get on that cell phone,” Johnson said. “Parents are not checking their computers, not checking their cell phones, not paying attention, paying attention, to what their kids are doing, and that's where we lose kids to predators.”
Johnson referenced a 2021 kidnapping case in which a 14-year-old girl from Davidson County was taken from her home by an adult man and brought to Arkansas. Johnson said an Arkansas officer saw the be-on-the-lookout alert issued by North Carolina authorities and returned the girl back to the state. The predator died due to what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a police pursuit.
According to the Invictus Project’s website, 500,000 predators scour the internet daily, targeting ages 12 to 15.
“These predators are not just in Alamance County, or Forsyth County or Randolph County,” Johnson said. “They're all over the country, and they will come to areas where these little girls are, trick them into thinking they're meeting a nice a young man, et cetera.”