A 26-year-old man from Żebbuġ is being investigated by police after he was duped into believing he was having a Skype conversation of a sexual nature with a 13-year-old girl.

Footage of the conversation was uploaded by the Facebook page ‘Mr Technical Difficult’, run by an American prankster, and had been viewed by 11,000 people yesterday.

The prankster posed as a 13-year-old girl who was willing to strip naked during a chat on Skype, with the aim of tracking online sexual predators.

“It’s gross, some of the men don’t even want to talk, they were already pleasuring themselves,” the prankster said in the video.

He reeled in several men by logging into a chat room, posing as a “13-year-old horny female” and asking people to add him on Skype for more details.

Once contact was established, the prankster communicated through Skype’s chat function, clearly stating that he was a 13-year-old girl, but did not show his face.

The Maltese man was one of several from around the world who made contact.

The prankster asked the men to first show their faces via a webcam. The calls all came to an abrupt end after the prankster switched on his own webcam and revealed his identity.

The police said that the case was being investigated by both the Cyber Crime Unit and the Vice Squad. In 2013, a Maltese paedophile was among 1,000 men caught pursuing online sex with children through the use of a computer-generated image of a 10-year-old Filipino girl nicknamed Sweetie.

The operation unmasked predators in more than 71 countries through the use of a fake web profile that reeled in the men with the image of the ‘little girl’.

The predators believed they were actually talking online to a real, living girl but, in reality, they were chatting to Dutch researchers from the charity Terre des Hommes.

The charity said it never actively approached predators, waiting instead for them to contact Sweetie, and that its researchers stopped all conversations once a user offered the young girl money to perform sexual acts.

The goal, they said, was to shed light on a growing form of webcam-based child exploitation, which has snared thousands of victims in the Philippines alone.