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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Watch what you say to that 13-year-old in a chat room. It could be a vigilante looking to do some tar-and-feathering.
Sep 15, 2003 | "Satine," an 18-year-old college sophomore who lives in Oregon, pretends to be a 13- to 15-year-old girl in Yahoo's regional chat rooms.
Her modus operandi: "I make up an alias on Yahoo chat. I find a picture from somewhere, usually a porn site. But I don't use a nude one. I say: 'Hi, my name is blah blah.' Then, the flood of instant messages come in. I almost always get a response."
Many of her conversations with random guys in the chat room turn raunchy, ranging from threesomes to oral sex: "One of them liked to be a submissive, and he wanted a 14-year-old girl to be his dominatrix," says a disgusted Satine, who says that she when she was actually 13 years old, an older friend molested her.
In the chats, Satine encourages her targets to try to arrange to meet her in person for sex; she told one 20-year-old who thought she was 15 that she wanted to lose her virginity, and gushed to a 21-year-old that she was looking for "some fun" -- "the kind that involves the naughty parts of my body."
sweet_as_kandy_15 (11:51:10 PM): so, what would you do with my naughty parts?
eclipse20202000 (11:51:36 PM): i would lick and rubb and massage
sweet_as_kandy_15 (11:51:43 PM): ooh
sweet_as_kandy_15 (11:51:51 PM): wanna meet sometime?
sweet_as_kandy_15 (11:52:02 PM): lol
eclipse20202000 (11:52:11 PM): we would have to see
Eclipse20202000 and other dupes like him soon discover that they haven't actually encountered a willing underage girl within driving distance eager to get together for "some fun." Instead, they've been stung by Perverted Justice, a vigilante force that targets "wannabe pedophiles" in chat rooms.
"If they actually try to make plans to meet and have sex, then you expose them on the site," says Satine. Any identifying info the chatter has handed over in the course of messaging with Satine, as well as whatever he posted about himself publicly in his profile, will soon appear on the Perverted Justice Web site, including his first name, home, work or cellphone number, hometown, instant-message handle, e-mail address, photo and the lurid chat transcripts. (The site does not include last names, because its operators assume that a guy planning to meet an underage girl for sex would not be likely to give his real one.)
All that personal data becomes ammunition for vengeful prank calls from the Web site's visitors. "If you get caught by Perverted Justice trying to sexually hook up with a minor, your life is going to become a nightmare," says Laura, aka "Spank This," a 36-year-old Kansas City, Mo., event planner and mother, who declined to give her last name. "You might as well be registered as a sex offender for all the attention that you're going to get."
But Laura, who chats posing as a girl between the ages of 10 and 13, admits that the men who take her bait haven't committed any crime: "It's a fine line. These guys are showing their intentions, they're taking overt steps for hooking up with a child, but technically they haven't done it, so from a law-enforcement point of view there is nothing to arrest yet."
Although no crime has actually been committed, the Perverted Justice "agents" see themselves as a kind of chat room brother's keeper, an in-your-face virtual neighborhood watch. "Obviously, they're not actual pedophiles," says Satine, who since joining the effort in August 2002 as an unpaid volunteer has made more than 20 such "busts." "They are just perverts that want to have a good time with an underage girl. We publicly humiliate them to get them to stop being perverted with these children."
