Online pedophiles & their expectations of success when setting up meetings with kids

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was watching one of those “catch the pedophiles” shows the other day and it was the usual complement of clueless idiots nabbed by police when they came to the prearranged place they thought they had set up.

In seeing these things the thought struck me that this is probably not the first time these guys have done this, and beyond that, what pre-teen or teenage girl or boy is going to be wanting to meet with these creeps?

Obviously these pedophiles must have some degree of success in getting kids to respond to this stuff or they wouldn’t keep at it … but why? Wouldn’t kids perceive sex with older men as kinda-sorta gross? Assuming there are consummated meetings before they got caught what in the world is compelling kids to do this dangerous nonsense? Especially teen-aged girls, why would a pot bellied 30 or 40 something guy be a better bet in any imaginable context than boys their own age?

2

Low self-esteem
Need for acceptance
Need for attention
None (or only a few) friends
Little involvement in family life
Money/gifts or promises thereof
(says the guy who at 19, met a bunch of you crazy folks, sight-unseen, at a Chicago bar…no sex involved though, for me at least)

3

I would imagine that they have not been successful in the past, and that they are just capable of kidding themselves to the point where they believe that somewhere out there is a nubile teenage girl who wants an older guy. I mean that’s what they’re convincing themselves of in the chats, isn’t it?

4

Many pedophiles are stupid, desperate, or both. Here’s what they need to understand:

(1) Kids NEVER go cruising the Internet for sex. (Well, some might. But that’s usually a sign of previous abuse.)
(2) Kids ALWAYS lie about their age. Try playing some MMORPGs – kids, when meeting adults, will often say they are several years older than they really are. (And if they’re intelligent enough, they’ll get away with it!)
(3) The most important thing…DON’T FUCK WITH KIDS!!! It’s WRONG!!!

5

I’m guessing that in a decent number of cases, the pedophile is lying about his age, pretending to be a teen. The kid goes off to meet him and only finds out the truth when it’s too late.

6

I think it’s fairly rare to find a pedophile cruising for teen-aged girls.

7

And, perhaps, more to the point, rare to find an online pedophile cruising for preteenagers, even. They go more for the kiddy porn. The vast majority of meetings are consensual and the meeters at least 12, but of course like others have said, online no one knows you’re a potbellied 40 year old.

8

perverted-justice.com does a pretty good job of showing how these guys operate. Part of the grooming process is telling a girl (or boy) that she’s very mature and no one her won age appreciates her the way an older man will. I also think a fair number of the victims tell themselves that they will just date until they turn 18.

9

I was wondering, with all the stories of stings netting all these pedophiles and hauling them off to jail, aren’t the ones left trying to be more careful? I still read about successful businessmen, military officers, even law enforcement professionals getting caught. What gives?

10

Even “smart” guys think with their dicks now and then. For some of these creeps, they can’t believe their luck: they’ve found their dream date and just don’t pay any mind to the old saying about things that are too good to be true.

As for convincing these girls or boys to meet, a lot of these guys know just what to say and have done their homework. Teens especially are vulnerable to this as it is probably their first-time experience at being conned or scammed and also fall for the too good to be true rule.

11

I remember what it was like, being a sex-starved teenager. I would have jumped at the opportunity.

12

They also go out of their way to harass, stalk, threaten and otherwise destroy the lives of people who have never been convicted of a crime. They alter the chat logs of the conversations they supposedly have with the targets, adding in comments and reducing the actual evidence value of that log to zero, since its origin cannot be proven. They operate on a basis of forcing a person (in at least one case, a mentally retarded individual) to admit to being a pedophile either over the phone or in an AOL or Yahoo chat room. They have absolutely no way of confirming that the person they’re harassing is a pedophile or even that they’re harassing the same person they talked to on the Internet, but they refuse to let up on the harassment until the target caves in. They call the target’s family, and employer if possible, to attempt to get them fired and cause the family to disown the target.

It’s a disgusting vigilante group that thrives on circling a victim like a wolf pack. Those who really work with law enforcement to catch pedophiles on the internet, like Julie Posey, want nothing to do with the likes of perverted justice.

At least their name is apt. They certainly have perverted justice. The only thing they do a ‘good’ job of is harassment, stalking, and making threats.

Don’t believe me? Join them. It didn’t take long before I found out what kind of people they really are.

13

In this day and age, what with all the attention being given to this subject in the news and such, I can’t understand how a guy cruising for young dates can fool himself into thinking that “sexxygrrl14” is actually a 14 year-old girl. It’s a cop! She wants to meet you for a hookup? It’s a cop! That sexy photo she sent you is not her! You’re walking right into jail!

Don’t these people read the papers? These guys must be dumber than a box of hammers to somehow think a setup like this will all work out they way they want. I mean, I guess its good that they don’t–all the easier to get them off the web and off the streets.

It’s like almost every time you read about a murder-for-hire. The “hitman” was actually an undercover officer. I’m thinking the ratio of actual hitmen to law enforcement is about 1:20. Talk about a losing bet.

14

“Oh, for – isn’t anybody here a real sheep?”

15

Oh, I completely agree with you about the vigilantism. I only mentioned them because their website includes some articles on the grooming process.
If you can point me to a better source of informtion on the psychology of pedophiles I’d be interested to know.

16

I’d recommend looking at Julie Posey’s website to get a start.

She’s got some articles and links, and has published a couple of books on the subject.

I know that having a Lifetime TV movie is usually an automatic black mark on someone’s credibility, but this is a woman who actually works with law enforcement and her background includes being in the employ of the DA’s office in Golden, Colorado and a police department in Kansas.

She’s not a fly-by-night vigilante, and has an archive of articles on the site that discuss the issue. What you won’t find on her site are a bunch of chat logs where she ‘outs’ a target and invites untrained individuals to dig up information about them, then harass them online.

Another site, which gives the other side of the perverted justice picture is corrupted justice. Some of the members there are former members of perverted justice. I am not one of them, nor am I suggesting that any type of ‘board war’ go on. The only reason I suggested joining perverted justice is that they hide what they’re doing from anyone who doesn’t register at the site. You have to register to read the forums, or at least you did when I checked it out.

I am, by no means, an expert on Internet predators who target children. I just suggest these things as a start. Those who know more than me could probably point you to a lot more information.

17

Man, you’re making some generalizations here.

Pathetic 300 pound loser sitting in a wifebeater eating doritos? Not so good. Middle-aged businessman with a well-groomed appearance and money to spare? Getting better. Succesful professional, handsome, with a nice car, maybe a boat, and a charming demeanor? Now we’re talking. Don’t assume that all men who seek out encounters with younger girls are hideous lardbuckets living in filthy hovels. There are plenty of older men out there who could score with the 21-and-older demographic just fine, if they wanted to, but prefer young girls. And if the girl is like most teenage girls, power and money will exert no less a powerful draw on them than on their mothers and older sisters.

18

I don’t believe I agree with the comments above.

While it’s true that they post copies of the chat logs on their site with comments added, they also keep a clean, unedited log. To the extent that keeping a log has evidentiary value at all, their practice of posting their comments does nothing to harm the value of it.

They do have a way of confirming the identity of the person they are chatting with - they call the person at home, and verify that the person they’re chatting with is actually associated with that phone number. I grant that this is not foolproof, but neither is it fairly described as “absolutely no way of confirming”. And of course, the stings they have done in concert with NBC Dateline have a pretty rock-solid method of confirmation: the people actually physically show up and are captured on camera (and by police).

Do you have any cite for a person accused by PJ that was not the person involved in the chat? what percentage of PJ targets are unjustly accused?

19

Even the very first one?

They go out of their way to harass, stalk, threaten and otherwise destroy the lives of people never convicted with a crime.

A) It’s true. I’ve read the message boards.

B) Even though what they’re supposedly trying to fight is some of the most disgusting human behavior, what they do (IMO, of course), makes them lower.
Or the last (even though it falls under the umbrella of the first)?

They call the target’s family, and employer if possible, to attempt to get them fired and cause the family to disown the target.

A) ditto

B) They gleefully post transcrips of these conversations (which, if they’re recording them may be a violation of law in itself).

It’s not a matter of how many are unjustly accused. If all the members of that Web site were doing was accusing, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal. They’re taking matters into their own hands, harassing, stalking, slandering and destroying the lives of people who they have very little evidence against and who have not been charged or convicted of any crime.

20

Then why did a spokeswoman for the Fairfax County Police Department in Fairfax Virginia say that absolutely zero arrests were made as a result of perverted justice’s Dateline NBC publicity stunt due to the fact that their logs were worthless as evidence?

Why if they have allegedly busted over a thousand pedophiles can they point to only 25 convictions (if that’s even true, since they don’t say which 25 were convicted nor what they were convicted of)?

I’m not a lawyer. I am, however, skeptical that a chat room log from someone who is not a law enforcement officer, not trained in law enforcement, and not trained in preserving computer files for forensic purposes meets any kind of standard that a DA would go for, much less that a judge would allow into a courtroom.

The logs are too easy to edit (which they prove on their website) and coming from Yahoo or AOL chatrooms, it seems virtually impossible for me to verify the identity of the person behind the nickname.

They call the person at home and the threats start. It’s not one person who calls, it’s several, and the person who answers is told from the get-go that if they don’t admit to being a pedophile, the perverted justice crowd will call their wife, their mother, their sister, their employer, the principal at schools in their neighborhood and tell them all what a pedophile the target is. It’s ‘admit to it, or we fuck up your life.’ Isn’t there a reason the cops aren’t allowed to beat a confession out of a suspect?

The fact of the matter is, you don’t know what that guy was told before he showed up there. It’s really easy to change 25 in a chat log to 15 and make it look good on TV. Also, I think it says something that Dateline NBC paid ‘Xavier Von Erck’ real name Phillip Eide and his vigilante group $100,000 to do these segments. I think it says the credibility of this report is for shit.

If a dozen people were calling you and telling you the names and phone numbers of people in your community, your boss, your preacher, and your wife and saying ‘We’re going to tell all these people that you’re a pedophile unless you admit it to us in a chatroom and let us sling shit at you and beg for forgiveness and you’re gonna lose your job and never see your kids again.’ what would you do? Would you tell them what they wanted to hear in the hope that they’d go away?

What would you do if you weren’t a lawyer?

And like Garfield226 said, it’s not just an accusation. I’ve seen conversations on perverted justice in which each member, after the phone number was publicly posted was instructed to use a prepaid calling card and call once per card in order to avoid giving any information that could lead to charges of harassment. They hide their real identities, they use calling cards so that targets can’t file harassment charges. They put flyers on windshields in the neighborhood with pictures and names and phone numbers on them. There was one post (and no, I don’t remember a link to it) where one perverted justice member threatened a guy with a baseball bat. They slander people who are opposed to their tactics of harassment and stalking. They have gone so far as to find out the identities of anyone who speaks out against what they do and harass them by calling their homes and their places of employment and telling their families and their bosses that these people are defenders of pedophilia. That’s what happened to the people who run corrupted-justice.com. This is not a group that is on the up-and-up.