How the search for men who prey on underage victims became a YouTube craze.

A couple of years ago, when Cam, her husband, and her brother-in-law would sit around watching YouTube, a certain kind of video kept popping up. The videos, which were made by groups like Dads Against Predators, the Predator Catchers Alliance, or the Alabama Predator Poachers, tend to follow a similar template, opening with screenshots of flirty messages exchanged between an adult man and someone purporting to be a teen-age girl or boy, set to an ominous soundtrack. After some brief hesitation—Do you mind my age? Your parents won’t know?—the adult’s messages turn more explicit. The pair arranges to meet up—after school, the “teen-ager” might say, I can get my mom to drop me off. Then, the scene shifts to the fluorescent-lit aisles of a Target, or to the parking lot outside a Dollar General. The camera zeroes in on a man standing by himself, furtively checking his phone, his posture betraying anxious anticipation. The predator catchers approach, phones up, cameras already recording. “Did you come here to meet a kid?” they say loudly. The man’s face betrays what is about to happen. He denies everything, or prays to God, or buries his face in his hands, or starts yelling. The predator catchers pepper him with questions and accusations: “Why are you chatting with kids online?” “You’re a pervert, you’re nasty.” They announce that they’re going to call the police, or that they’ve already called the police. Eventually, the man walks or runs away, as his name and license-plate number flash on the screen.

The thought of adult men attempting to meet up with children got Cam’s blood boiling. And here were regular people, not cops or television journalists, actually doing something about it. Her husband and her brother-in-law were inspired. “They were, like, ‘What if we do something like this locally?’ ” Cam, who lives in Odessa, Texas, told me. (Cam asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because she fears retaliation.) “And I’m, like, ‘O.K., sure, I’ll follow.’ ”

Predator-hunter videos take an enduring social-media trend—performing stunts for clout—and add a dash of vigilante justice and participatory true crime. In the past few years, they have become a minor YouTube phenomenon, one of the platform’s proliferating subgenres that can feel ubiquitous in some parts of the online universe yet invisible in others. They typically follow the formula made famous by the TV segment “To Catch a Predator” in the early two-thousands, but with a more chaotic, D.I.Y. energy. (Earlier this year, a sting operation spiralled into a fistfight in a North Carolina Target, ending with a predator catcher shot in the leg.) The most popular examples have hundreds of thousands of views, and have inspired people to bring the trend to their own town. In 2019, NBC identified about thirty predator-catcher online groups scattered across the country; recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year.

Cam was eight years old in 2004, when “To Catch a Predator” began airing on “Dateline,” on NBC. The segment’s host, Chris Hansen, had heard about Perverted-Justice, a watchdog group whose members posed as teen-agers in chat rooms. NBC producers gave the group’s operations a prime-time makeover: renting a house and rigging it with cameras, and hiring young-looking actors to pose as decoys. (They also paid Perverted-Justice more than a hundred thousand dollars per instance.) When a man arranged a meeting with a supposed teen at the sting house, he would instead be confronted by Hansen, and by a squad of local cops ready to charge him with online solicitation of a minor, a crime punishable by between five and ten years in prison.

Although there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it’s “this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with,” Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of “Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State,” said. “It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven’t fully grappled with.” The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them. “On the show, it’s not the family, it’s not priests or rabbis or other authority figures who pose a threat to children, it’s this devious stranger,” Renfro said. The show’s influence helped spur the passage of the Adam Walsh Act, in 2006, which created publicly searchable databases of people convicted of certain sex crimes. (There’s little evidence that sex-offender registries have been effective at reducing sexual offenses.)

“To Catch a Predator” faced criticism, most notably that it flirted with entrapment and blurred the lines between entertainment and law enforcement. But the show’s justification—that it was going after men who were preying on kids—tended to overwhelm the critique. Then, in 2007, a sting against Bill Conradt, a man from Terrell, Texas, went horribly wrong. For a few weeks, Conradt exchanged explicit messages with a Perverted-Justice member posing as a thirteen-year-old boy, but, when the time came to meet up, Conradt stopped responding. Police decided to arrest him at his home instead—and the production followed. When a SWAT team burst into his house, trailed by a camera crew, Conradt shot himself. NBC later settled a lawsuit with Conradt’s family, which alleged that producers had “steamrolled” police into the rushed arrest.

The program was cancelled, but vigilante operations persisted in less popular television shows like “To Catch a Con Man” and in the occasional YouTube video. Recently, as conspiracies about “groomers” and child-sex-trafficking rings have circulated widely online, amateur predator hunting has come back into style.

Odessa is a city in the petroleum-rich Permian Basin, where oil-field jobs draw large numbers of transient workers. Crime rates are well above state averages, and services for victims are woefully inadequate. Cam knew that some of the more established YouTube channels warned viewers not to attempt their own sting operations, but her husband and her brother-in-law weren’t dissuaded. They settled on a name—the Permian Basin Predator Patrol—and began creating fake profiles on dating sites. Cam didn’t want to use a real child’s photograph, so she uploaded a de-aged picture of herself, or a gender-swapped image of her brother-in-law. “He looks very young,” she said. “Like a fifteen-year-old.” To join the sites, she set her decoy’s age as eighteen, but when men chatted with her, she told them she was fifteen or sixteen. Some immediately blocked her or stopped chatting, but others were unfazed.

Last April, the Permian Basin Predator Patrol arranged its first sting, at a Walmart in Odessa. “We were incredibly nervous, not knowing how this person was going to respond, not knowing if they were going to have a firearm—because, of course, we’re in Texas,” Cam said. The video of the brief confrontation was not particularly compelling; at moments, the audio was so muffled that it was difficult to hear what people were saying. But, a week after uploading it, Cam woke up to dozens of notifications on her phone: the Internet had discovered the Permian Basin Predator Patrol. The vast majority of the comments were positive. People called them vigilantes, but they meant it as a compliment, Cam said. “They told us they’re glad that we’re doing the research, that it’s about time somebody did this. They’re giving us names, like, ‘Hey, this guy might be a predator, look into him.’ ”

On “To Catch a Predator,” Hansen and Perverted-Justice seemed to work in concert with the police. The members of the Permian Basin Predator Patrol initially hoped that they’d be able to turn their investigations over to the authorities, who could use the information to make arrests. But, soon after the channel started drawing attention, they were called to a meeting at the Odessa Police Department. According to Cam, officers made it clear that they disapproved of their activities. “We were told we can’t be involved with them, and that we can’t send them anything directly,” she said. “One, we’re endangering ourselves, and, two, we’re giving them more work—that’s what it seemed like they were saying.”

“We are very mindful of not trying to entrap a suspect,” Lieutenant Brad Cline, who works in the Odessa Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons Unit, said. “Taking a predator into custody can be very dangerous as well.”

The Permian Basin Predator Patrol continued to make videos. If she couldn’t contribute to an arrest, Cam thought, at least she could get the word out to the public. She became an expert at figuring out the identities of the men she was chatting with, even when they used fake names. “Being females, it’s like we’re F.B.I. agents in our own minds,” she said. Sometimes she’d find a man’s family on Facebook and send his mother screenshots of the obscene messages he’d sent, or call his employer. “I believe three of them have been let go from their jobs,” she said.

A sting by the Predator Catchers Indianapolis led to a man’s conviction for child solicitation. The prosecutor told the Washington Post that he expected to see more vigilante investigations: “There are individuals out there that may look on this and say, ‘Hey, if it’s good for child predators, why is it not good for thieves or, you know, drugs or something of that nature?’ ”

Although YouTube’s predator hunters tend to portray themselves as the unequivocal good guys (Cam is an exception—most are men), their track record is more mixed. At least one man, Kyle Swanson, has faced felony charges of obstructing justice and unlawful restraint, stemming from an incident in which he lured a man to his car, threatened to hit him, and prevented him from leaving. Swanson ended up taking a plea deal and agreed to shut down his predator-hunter Facebook group to avoid prosecution. The Ohio-based group Dads Against Predators has reportedly been banned from local grocery stores for causing disturbances. In 2018, a twenty-year-old in Connecticut hanged himself after a confrontation with a predator-hunter group. One video by the Permian Basin Predator Patrol ends with a man weeping, then running into traffic. (Cam said that she asked police to perform a welfare check on him, but she’s not sure if it occurred.)

Cam knows that the predators are out there, but recently she’s had a harder time getting to them. Her profiles on dating sites keep getting reported and shut down, and the sites have banned her from making new ones. Pretending to be a teen-ager has turned out to be more difficult than she expected. I told her that these safeguards seemed like an encouraging sign. “But for every five fake profiles they catch, ten more are slipping through,” she said. Even if her own predator patrol was on temporary hiatus, at least the message was getting out: “We’ve had people message us from Austin, and other parts of Texas, to tell us, ‘Hey, we want to do the same thing here.’ ” ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-disturbing-rise-of-amateur-predator-hunting-stings