According to a media report, German prosecutors were seeking a player who had exhibited real-life paedophile video files in a Second Life clubroom. The information has been mad public during Report Mainz, an investigative programme on Germany's ARD public television.

Nick Schader, a reporter of Report Mainz, and a member of Second Life, said he had been "shocked to see" the virtual child pornography meetings, Washington Post reported.

Speaking with DPA, Peter Vogt, the prosecutor in the German city of Halle, said  "I assume we are going to catch this user fairly quickly." "I don't believe it's a one-off case and would assume there are other spaces where child porn is being traded.” he added.

A spokesman for state of Bavaria police, said "cyber-cops", real-life German police who hunt online for offenders, were doing spot checks of Second Life, but they had not discovered the law being broken.

Waldinger conceded it was difficult to stop pornographic images of avatars involved in under-age sex. Where kiosk images of real children were posted, these provided evidence that a real child had been abused.

Last week, a ComScore study revealed that 61 per cent of Second Life’s users are Europeans and with 209,000 of them from Germany compared to 207 000 from the United States.

Second Life is a virtual 3D world where the best content is user-created - the houses, the furniture, the clothes that people wear, and more has been built by its users. Once created, objects can be bought and sold using the Second Life virtual currency, known as Linden Dollars. These can be sold for real U.S. dollars, so that users can make real money from their Second Life activity.