In 2009, while browsing the website Perverted Justice, Steve* stumbled upon an article regarding a child who was being openly groomed by a user named Riverman72.
Steve decided to track down this paedophile and uncover his messages in order to save any further children from harm. After a couple of days of searching, Steve had managed to gain access to his social media accounts and even hacked into his emails.
“It was quite unpleasant trying to find information and proof. The messages were sickening but it made me more resolved to exposing him,” Steve said.
“I can be a bit like a dog with a bone when it comes to digging out information so I never was concerned with the amount of work that was needed. It was easy to find the answers to his secret questions.”
To Steve, starting the job was easy but finishing was difficult, as he attempted to compile all the evidence without being caught. But, when all the information was collected, Steve quickly published it on every account he could.
“Submitting the article, exposing him on his Facebook and knowing that I was publicly humiliating and exposing an utter stranger was both scary and exhilarating.”
According to Steve, Riverman72 panicked when he acknowledged he had been caught: “When he discovered he was having difficulty accessing his emails, he realized what had happened and again tried to delete fucking everything – his YouTube, LiveJournal, PayPal, Amazon – he even attempted to close down his Facebook, but this was salvaged by the noobs who had broken in, so fortunately his real life friends have been informed. “
After posting the evidence on social media and Encyclopedia Dramatica, a now-deleted Wikipedia parody-themed website that posted content about Internet culture, Steve proceeded to attach information about Riverman72 in an email and sent it to the police, documenting why this man is a ‘danger to society’. In his email, he included Riverman’s name, location, and his chat logs with young children.
However, Steve never heard anything back from the police, and still believes he is a free man.
Steve said: “Sometimes, I felt pangs of regret about humiliating someone in such a way, but when I look at the Encyclopedia Dramatica page I made, it makes me think it was well-deserved; it reminds me of how gross he was.”
Steve isn’t the only civilian behind a keyboard that decided to take the law into their own hands. Since the airing of To Catch a Predator in 2004, many paedophile hunting groups have surfaced on the internet, with the aims to trap predators and expose them.
“I’m not looking at the dick, I’m looking at those yellow curtains, because when I drive around his estate, I bet there aren’t going to be that many yellow curtains.”
A hunter from Guardians of The North
According to data obtained by the BBC last year, 403 people were prosecuted in 2018 for attempting to meet a child following sexual grooming. Over 250 of those prosecuted were charged following evidence gathered by these hunting groups. In some force areas, the evidence accounted for 100 per cent of the cases.
However, Assistant Chief Constable Dan Vajzovic of the National Police Chiefs’ Council pointed out that UK law enforcement agencies arrest more than 500 suspected child abusers every month.
“Some of those prosecutions may have diverted police resources from more significant offenders,” he said to the BBC.
“Overall the activity of these groups is not positive.”
Author Richard Hardwick spent a year following the lives of the UK’s biggest hunter group, Guardians of the North, which currently holds 13,000 members on Facebook. After writing novels such as Kicked Out (2009) and The Truth About Prison (2017), for his latest book Paedophile Hunters, he wanted to see the inner workings of these kinds of groups.
In Guardians of the North, each message is screenshotted, each phone call recorded, and each image saved to a USB file they later hand to the police after conducting a citizen’s arrest on their capture. In their conversation, the hunters will constantly be on the lookout to catch the predator in action in order to find them and create a sting.
Richard said: “All the time, they will be on Google Maps trying to work out where the predators live, and when they get sent pictures of their private parts, the hunter will be looking at the background details.
“They’ll say ‘I’m not looking at the dick, I’m looking at those yellow curtains, because when I drive around his estate, I bet there aren’t going to be that many yellow curtains’.”
While Guardians of the North have strict guidelines when setting up their stings, Richard tells me that not every group operates in a similar way.
Richard said: “Some teams will live stream their capture, but they don’t care about taking people to court. They just want to gain the hundreds of people watching it.
“They’re kind of glory hunters in some ways, and Guardians of the North believe these groups can get all of them shut down, because they aren’t doing things in a lawful way.”
These live stings are one of the main features of some hunting groups; live-streaming their capture to hundreds of viewers while they interrogate who they claim to be a predator.
Last year, a live sting went viral online after COBRAUK, a paedophile hunting group situated in Hertfordshire, confronted a man trying to meet with a 14-year-old girl. Although the original Facebook video from COBRAUK was taken down, multiple reuploads have occurred through social media sites such as Youtube.
The sting became an online ‘meme’, poking fun at the alleged predator’s visible upset. Twitter fan pages were created, such as @ThatBaldNonce which holds 50,000 followers, and the meme was passed across the internet. Unaware of its severity, many who shared it didn’t know the video’s origin, showing how these groups sometimes cannot control how widespread their footage goes.
However, not every live sting holds ‘viral meme’ success, and can instead turn dark. In 2013, a man named Peter told The Guardian about how a sting ruined his life. Thinking he was meeting an 18-year-old girl, he arrived at the designated meeting area but then received a text claiming she was 15. As he attempted to leave, a group accosted him and posted his interrogation online.
Although Staffordshire Police concluded there was no case to prosecute, the damage had already been caused, and Peter received death threats, lost his job, and had members of his family leave him. “I am a shell of a man. I am completely broken,” he told the Guardian.
Child protective organisations also hold concerns over the independent hunting groups. The NSPCC, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, stated to the BBC: “Their actions might put more children at risk of harm by driving offenders underground, endangering ongoing police work and the legal process, or result in innocent people being targeted.”
Former Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a command in the UK National Crime Agency, Jim Gamble admits that while he understands their frustrations, he is 100% against these ‘vigilante groups’, believing many of these groups only go into ‘hunting’ to build up a social media following and become an online celebrity.
He believes there should be a law that makes it unlawful to operate as a vigilante, but a law that facilitates the creation of digital special constables.
“My position on this has been that we need to stop vigilantism, but we need to learn from it.
“Law enforcement needs to reflect on its own arrogance, and I say that having been a police officer and a senior one for many many decades, and accept it can learn from the practices.”
He admits to having seen these groups target people and due to it being live-streamed, members of the public have found their location and assaulted the alleged paedophile.
Jim tells me that without connections to the criminal justice system, it is impossible for these paedophile hunting groups to hold all the control in their arranged stings. Instead, hunters can unwittingly be putting children in more danger.
Jim stated: “Well ultimately, you can lure me [the predator] to meet. But you don’t know if I live in Birmingham, Belfast, or Brighton. If you lure me to meet, can you surveil me from my house to the train station? Can you place surveillance on the train to make sure when I do get off, I get off at the right train station and the right park and meet YOU?
“What if I get off at the wrong station, go to the wrong park and fall upon a real 13-year-old who I think I’m meeting up with?”
“Once they sexually motivate and inspire an offender to move from A to B to meet, that offender is in a state of arousal thinking they’re going to meet a child.
“If you lose control of that person, they’re going to be out there and a significant risk to children.”
It isn’t illegal for vigilante groups to conduct their stings, but with law enforcement strongly against it, and the weighted damage it can do to the community it’s trying to help, is it right?
*Steve has been used to replace the identity of the vigilante in order to keep their identity confidential
If anything in this article has affected you, please contact the NSPCC or Thinkuknow for help.
Major Project - Tara Dalton 
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