Article by Steven Yoder calls motivation for sex offender stings into question.
When I began volunteering for FAC a lifetime ago, I responded to a member call from a man I thought was delusional. He began by explaining how he found himself on the registry and the story seemed too preposterous to believe. He posted an ad in the personals section of Craigslist, a section intended for adults only, and began chatting with a few women. One chat turned very sexual and he got caught up in the excitement. At some point the woman he was talking to mentioned the fact that she had a daughter, which he was fine with. He wasn’t looking to be a step dad, he just wanted to hook up with this woman he was talking to. After a long and convoluted chain of messages (which were further confused by other women he was talking to), this woman turned out to be an undercover officer, the sexual conversations were taken out of context as if they were discussing the daughter and here he is.
I hung up the phone thinking to myself, “yeah right!” There is no way! There were too many absurdities in his story. Why would undercover police go into an adult site, pretending to be a child, pretending to be an adult pretending to be a child and initiate sexual conversations with people looking to meet adults? Police have much better things to do than trying bait people into sex with a fictional minor. Plus, if this were a real issue, law enforcement would be working with the dating apps to implement some sort of an identity verification or something. Clearly that would do more to protect kids than this?
It wasn’t a matter of days until I spoke with someone else who shared an almost identical story, and then another, and then another, before I realized this was an actual thing. This was actually happening and it was not a minority of the people caught up in this situation, it’s the majority.
As years passed and we learned more about these online stings, we uncovered a lot of sketchy practices. Steven Yoder’s article in The Appeal sheds some light on the motivation for these stings. It looks like $30,000,000 a year in funding might be that motivation and unless law enforcement can show results, by any means necessary, that $30,000,000 could be at risk of drying up.
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Yes this is a problem cause there are a lot who have been on the registry for that but never even had a victim what no one takes notice is on their arrest sheets the office types in we target the suspect.Becare they are doing it on all sites.
And until someone with connections or $ files suit requesting a TRO to halt stings and have them investigated with the plethora of evidence showing the corruption, nothing will change
This is a very common practice with Law enforcement they will do anything and everything to keep the numbers up for the registry. They can’t catch any real predators in order to keep the federally funded money so they commit crimes to entrap people in adult only dating site s many men have been stung by these sting operations it unfair unjust and shows how malicious they really are to catch someone up in these stings
I’m willing to bet they would find many more real individuals who seek minors to exploit hiding in positions of law enforcement than anybody can ever find on any adult dating or hookup site. It’s just also common knowledge that those who seek minors to exploit go to places where they know they can find minors, and these individuals also tend to hide in positions where no one would suspect them of being this type of person. It’s also common sense that no one would think of going to an adult only place to find children to exploit.
Hello, mine was the same thing. A 34 year old single mother of a 14 years old daughter.the mother kept flip flopping conversations about herself and her past and her daughter. At times seemed like I was talking to multiple people. She was very pushy.when I got arrested they had me initial the emails and I told the officers I never seen some of them but they told me to initial them anyways. And it was on Craig’s list under the adult intimate section. Where is makes you click that you are 18 and up before you enter it. No history prior or after that for anything like that. Public defender told me he wasn’t gonna help me clear my name. Fast forward to now. I won’t mention employers name or description. But my employer didn’t like my charges and treated me worse than everyone else and refused to give me raises and made me do alot more work which caused knee surgery and then lower back surgery. Now if I’m lucky I’ll get disability for 13k a year for over 25 years of working. This is a true statement, please don’t edit it out like last time… my former managers and assistant managers told me that the higher upside in the company wanted them to fire me because of my felony, but they said no because I was the best employee they had. But they had to do the things they did to try and force me to quit, even after calling osha on them. Well because of the police and the horrible things they did at 39 my life is essentially over, destroyed back and knee and I have a son I can’t do much with anymore and there is no law to help me. I wish any who have jobs to be careful.. those are true statement from managers as they left the company telling me they intentionally did the things to destroy my body to make me leave the job. Not hearsay as I have also overheard conversations. Stay safe out there everyone
Just an example
A guy I knew years ago Was a major pamala anderson nut he would type in pamala anderson nude into his search bar on a p2p site. Well he got a file titled pamala anderson5yo 1997. So he thought since this took place in 2002 it was a pic from 2997 which would make it a 5 year old picture. Well as you can guess this was not the case. It was a little girl nude which was set up by the sheriff to arrest people for Child porn. So FAC is quite correct you never know what your doing to get no matter what the header says it is or if it sounds plossible that its innocent or not .