Last November, a 29-year-old Portland, Oregon, man was cruising the city's Yahoo chat room when he struck up a conversation with a 14-year-old girl using the handle "misspunkgirlie13." The conversation quickly turned to sex.
"i'm 29.. your 14 and adorable," he wrote the girl, who flirted back. He e-mailed her a picture of his penis and a couple of pornographic video clips, then arranged to meet her at her apartment when her mother was out of town.
A few days later, he drove an hour to the girl's home and knocked on the door. When it opened, he found himself face-to-face with two large men -- one wielding a baseball bat and the other, a video camera. They followed him back to his minivan, berating him for soliciting sex with a minor and filming his hasty retreat.
Within hours, the man's libidinous chat transcript, picture, cell-phone number and e-mail address were posted to Perverted-Justice.com, a website run by vigilantes across the United States who troll regional chat rooms hunting for would-be pedophiles. Perverted Justice has made more than 600 such busts since it was formed in July 2002. The group's volunteers pose as kids in chat rooms, and when an adult engages them in sexual banter, they publish the person's personal data on the site so the group's supporters can harass the adult by phone and e-mail.
The group says it's protecting children from sexual predators, but critics say its aggressive tactics seldom lead to convictions.
Among the men -- and two women -- busted by the group are a wrestling promoter, a high-school teacher and a registered sex offender.
In several cases, the activists have gotten men fired after finding out where they work and sending the damning chat logs and pictures to their bosses. The group is the brainchild of a 24-year-old Portland computer technician who goes by the moniker "Xavier von Erck." (Von Erck and the site's volunteers don't disclose their real names, fearing retribution by the people they've "outed.")
Von Erck said he was inspired to action after learning how many of his female friends were molested as kids and how many would-be pedophiles lurked in regional chat rooms.
"Myself and another local man named Frank set out to clean up our Portland chat room," said von Erck. "Well, it worked a little too well, and a few too many people wanted to help out. So after we exhausted the Portland rooms, we moved on. And kept going into what you see today."
While some Perverted Justice contributors simply out their marks during illicit chats and tell them their data will be posted to the site,
a volunteer named "Frank Fencepost" has men show up at his apartment bearing food, and answers the door with a baseball bat and a camera. (Fencepost did not respond to interview requests for this article.) The men snared by the group are given a chance to explain their actions in "right of reply" letters, which are posted on the site. Most contend they have learned their lesson and beg the site to take down their phone numbers so people will stop harassing them.
"People pm me all the time and tell me that they are going to find me and hurt me, threaten to kill me, and etc.... i cry at night sometimes cause i fear for my life, since people seem to see what i look like, im very scared," wrote a 20-year-old who asked that his picture be taken off the site.
"I want to write and apologize for what I have done. I am someone with a problem and (am) finding help for it. I have told my family about this and now I living with a friend of mine. I have been kicked out of my house indifenitely," wrote a married Arizona man. In recent months, the group has worked with television stations in eight cities across the nation to bust men on camera. In these media busts, Perverted Justice directs groups of men to a rented home in a residential area for what they believe will be a tryst with an adolescent girl; instead the men are greeted by a camera crew and a reporter sticking a microphone in their faces. In February, 16 men showed up for such a sting in Missouri and 20 showed up in Detroit.
The sensational reports have irked some communities, which have accused the group and the TV stations of endangering local children by bringing sexual predators into their neighborhoods.
Law enforcement officials and seasoned activists who work as decoys in Internet pedophilia investigations have also denounced the group's methods. "The biggest difference between them and us is that we are governed by entrapment laws," said Sgt. Nick Battaglia, who heads the police department's child exploitation unit in San Jose, California. "Their hearts are in the right place, but the law needs to be enforced by someone who is qualified to enforce them. They need to be very careful or they could get in trouble themselves."
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http://perverted-justice.com/http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62650,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
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