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This does sound plausible. A friend was looking for "haiku" information for her daughter, spelled it wrong, and wound up at a Japanese porn site. I've had a porn site come up accidentally after mistyping a URL. And (as I mentioned in another thread), I know of a guy who was looking at the Usenet one night at work that was so upset by what he stumbled upon that he beeped his manager in the middle of the night (I know the manager). The kind of thing described here can and does happen. And once you view those images, they may be stored on your hard drive. And as he said about "boys", some keywords do have "code word" meanings to the point that I've often taken to typing "-sex" (i.e., exclude pages with the word "sex" in them) into searches to prevent seeing sex sites. If you have a filter or AOL, you might not see them but if you don't and search for the wrong word, you sure can.

Oh, it's possible you could run into these sites accidentally. It's not possible to 'accidentally' give them your credit card number. It's quite suspicious that Townshend was interested in 'researching' subjects that consistently led him to encounter child pornography.