NC: 16 arrested after law enforcement pretended to be minors online
People! If you come across a “minor” online, it’s a cop!
Seriously. In North Carolina, 16 people were arrested in a four-day undercover operation that involved more than 150 officers from 13 different law enforcement agencies. Wait a second… 150 officers. For 16 arrests. That’s… roughly 9 officers per “predator.” (Seems a bit overkill, no?)
According to the report officers posed as minors online, conversations were initiated and carried out by law enforcement, the operation resulted in 80+ charges against 16 men (none of which were on the registry). And of course, it came with nice headline.
Nothing says “effective policing” like assembling a small army, pretending to be children on the internet, and then congratulating yourselves for the results you helped create.
At this point, the safest assumption anyone can make online is if someone suddenly tells you they’re underage it’s a government employee on overtime. But hey—great teamwork, everyone.
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From 19 -87 in ages of those arrested and charged…
Sadly, some of those in a sting with “NO real victim” will end up with more time than some of us who actually had a real physical victim. Even if you lawyer up and get a deal, you have a felony on your record, could lose your job, and most likely be put on a registry, and spend your life savings fighting the charges and hiring a lawyer.
I don’t want to sound overly inquisitive, but I do find myself wondering about our society’s deep preoccupation with sex and sex crimes. Sexuality is woven into nearly every corner of American culture—media, advertising, entertainment, the arts. For as long as humans have existed, sex has been a source of fascination, sometimes even obsession, usually kept behind the curtain of private life.
But at some point, we shifted from treating sexuality as a private matter to building an ever expanding legal and enforcement apparatus around it. And I can’t help asking whether the constant layering of harsher laws, broader definitions, and more aggressive policing actually fuels the very fixation we claim to be fighting.
We’ve created an entire business model around this. From SMART grants to federal subsidies for local police, from Marshall alerts sent to foreign countries to lifetime registries that apply even to some first time, nonviolent offenses, we now incentivize agencies to run online sting operations and expand their “sex crime” units. As a country, we have carved out an exception to our own constitutional principles when it comes to these offenses. In some states, there are effectively no minor sex crimes—only lifelong punishments. It raises a legitimate question: are we trying to solve a problem, or are we creating new business opportunities by continually expanding the definition of the problem?
Meanwhile, how much appetite is there for reducing redundant or ineffective legislation—especially when academic research repeatedly shows that many of these laws do little or nothing to reduce sexual offending? Instead, we broaden the net. We add low level behaviors—selfies, streaking, public urination, consensual petting, simple nudity—to registries originally intended for dangerous offenders. We label nearly every sexual offense as “sex trafficking,” even when the conduct has nothing to do with trafficking at all. We even mark passports to deter “sex tourism,” applying American standards to conduct that is legal elsewhere.
The result is a sprawling, self-perpetuating system that treats expansion as progress, even when the evidence says otherwise. And it leaves me wondering whether our cultural fixation on sex has merged with our legislative machinery in a way that no longer serves public safety, but instead reinforces a cycle of fear, punishment, and bureaucracy.
You are spot on. The world could come to an end and all lawmakers seem to be fixated on sex offenders. It makes you wonder !!
I would ask the publishers of this forum to not censor this comment because they think that it is counterproductive or extreme
I am not trying to be counterproductive, extreme or otherwise antisocial. I simply wish to make an observation. I think that the only way to better The human condition is to let the truth speak for itself.
Here is observation of Truth:
1) It seems that every time the authorities set up a sex sting trying to pose as minors, they seem to get dozens and dozens, if not, hundreds, of responses from men of all ages, income levels, social backgrounds and races indeed, we can truthfully say that this behavior seems quite ubiquitous. – very common.
2) These men who are getting caught are, often otherwise, decent, respectable and upstanding members of the community.
3) These men have families who love and respect them.
4) Many of them are hard workers with decent employment and years on the job.
5) Many are decorated and honored veterans of the military.
5) They all had one thing in common though, they all secretly, in their heart of hearts, wished to be sexual with a minor child.
4) Our society here in the United States has tried to stamp out behaviors that have been widely condemned socially. The war on drugs comes to mind. Another war that was waged that comes to mind was the war on homosexuality.
We have now declared all-out war on those who bear that secret desire that I mentioned just a moment ago. That seems to be much more. Ubiquitous than most people would like to believe.
I hope that the editors s of this forum see fit to print truth. I have not stated anything here in this post that is not truthful, I believe.
Not saying pursuing said desire is right, obviously it isn’t. But remember these stings rarely start off with Law Enforcement posing as a minor, they start off posing as adults on adult sites. They engage in conversation for a period of time until they know the person is interested and then reveal themselves as “minors” and continue aggressive and coercive tactics and push as hard as they can to get the person to commit to meeting. In essence their job is to create the crime and then arrest.
Again, simple, neutral, noncommittal, and detached truth:
I have known many persons who got caught in these stings, and I have been genuinely concerned about their “entrapment”. I have probed and asked questions of these entrapt ones.
But these interviews always comes to an acute point where my questions becomes, “So you finally were told clearly and directly that the person you were talking to was, in fact, a minor child?” And their response is inevitably, “…we-ee-ll, ….. yes.”
Aha!!
So the desire (though perhaps latent) was there, and it was acted on.
And the fact remains that many, many, many persons are getting caught (Most of them men, but not all).
These are seemingly ordinary and benign uncles, brothers, brothers-in-law, coaches, clergymen, family friends, etc. These are (for the most part) not creeps who walk around in public naked under their trench coats. These are not unshaven, homeless dirty-old creeps who jump out of bushes. These are our loved ones and friends!! These are seemingly normal, good, decent people!
As uncomfortable as the following conclusions are, they must be faced:
EITHER
1) We have a massive hidden mental health crisis in this country (and I would argue, planetwide)!!! (And I mean massive!) OR
2) We must accept that normal human nature can lead us to desires that we are not fully comfortable addressing as a society but are, nonetheless, native, prevalent, and widespread.
(Insert uncomfortable silence here)
That’s an interesting point and one that I wondered myself. I find now with the prevalence of social media and messaging platforms (and a complete lack of moderation) only exacerbates the problem or exposes a deeper issue that must be addressed. I believe Law enforcement is likely aware of this and exploits it as much as they can. It takes much less effort on their part. Why use 150 law enforcement officers trying to stop actual crime and all the work that entails, when they can sit in an air-conditioned room pretending to be a 13-year-old girl all day (making bank in overtime)?
Yes. And another curious note about human psychology: The more taboo something is, the more secretly “delightful” (to many – not most).
If people (in general) would just stop tripping so hard about sexuality, then people wouldn’t be so attracted to “forbidden fruit”.
I am reminded of made-up novel by the ficticious author Kilgore Trout in one of Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s novels (I think it was Breakfast of Champions) where food becomes fetishized.
It seems that there was this planet where people only ate synthetic food because real food was extremely expensive. The people of this planet were fixated by a form of pornography that featured platters and platters of fresh, juicy, plump berries and creamy, sugary fruit and glistening pork chops and crispy baked potatoes oozing with sour cream and butter!
The climax was always where the people (after gorging themselves) would throw away garbage can after garbage can full of food scraps in an orgy of food waste! (It was sensory overload around something they can’t have.)
When you forbid something, it often becomes irresistable!
Here is what ChatGPT has to say:
When something is:
forbidden
restricted
morally charged
…it doesn’t disappear—it often becomes:
more mentally preoccupying
more symbolically loaded
more “charged” than it would otherwise be
Vonnegut just swaps sex with food to expose the mechanism.
Just some “FOOD” for thought…. 🙂
That is why I think there should be complete transparency with respect to the chat logs in these cases. The integrity of the justice system is at stake.
Why is that when we hear about actual victims of sexual abuse, it’s places where children are expected to gather online, but when we hear about these stings, the stakeouts are always on adult websites?
We must have the most idiotic justice system in the world.
Anonymous
That couldn’t have happened to me because I did not own my first computer until I got out of prison. Well strike that, I did office work in prison, but the computer was not mine but I learned on it and actually got paid. It was something like 20 cents an hour five days a week.
Several of the prisons had companies outside the compound get cheap labor from those of us who had some sorts of skills. Since I was a college graduate, they snatched me up. Was a lot better than picking vegetables in the hot sun for no pay.
Have you guys watched this about police sting operations? He explains it very well: https://youtu.be/LqwJFuntco4
Here is an article about it:
John Oliver on police stings: ‘might actually be doing more harm than good’
The Last Week Tonight host says police stings can manufacture criminals yet lead to real punishments
Guardian staff
Mon 23 Mar 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/mar/23/john-oliver-police-stings