Evening Standard (London): Phone roulette girls spark alert

TWO 14-year-old girls travelled several hundred miles to meet a stranger after playing a bizarre new blind-dating game called "telephone roulette", it was reported today.

Sarah Jayne Perry and Anelise Sinclair, both from Worthing, Sussex, went to Manchester for a secret liaison with a boy whose telephone number they had dialled at random on their mobile phones.

Both eventually returned safely, but the dangers of the game sparked warnings from police and child protection groups today. Sarah Jayne's father Les, who went to Manchester to search for the schoolgirls, told The Guardian: "Apparently there's this teenage craze using their mobile phones. They dial numbers and just talk to the people who answer at the other end. Neither of them has gone missing before and I just can't believe they did this. They could have got into all sorts of trouble." Both teenagers are understood to have met their "roulette date" after dialling several different numbers at random on mobile phones given to them for their personal safety. They then skipped school to visit the boy in Eccles. Mr Perry was forced to visit Manchester to help police scan hours of CCTV footage from the city's stations after the pair rang to say they were safe but refused to reveal exactly where they were. A Sussex Police spokesman said: "If two teenage girls arrange to meet strangers randomly, they are making themselves much more vulnerable than having simply run away." John Hall, children's services advisor for ChildLine, said: "Telephones are a built-in part of teenage life but there are obvious risks attached to games like so-called telephone roulette." An estimated 250,000 under-16s in the UK have mobile phones.