The strange world of pedophile hunters

Essex, England

It’s a Wednesday evening, and I’m getting psyched up to go catch a pedophile with the boys. Playlist on, rocking down the A12 and chatting to my new mate, Nick, in his van. There’s a man not far from here who thinks he’s going to meet an underage girl tonight. He doesn’t know that we’ll be pulling up instead and that his sick fantasy — and his life as he knows it — will be over.

Nick is a guy I met on Facebook who runs a team of pedophile hunters called London Overwatch. He says that he’s caught 300 pedophiles, and that tonight’s is one of the worst. This man believes he has been talking to a fourteen-year-old girl and has apparently been sending her obscene videos while he’s on holiday with his family. The “girl” is really a woman on Nick’s team.

T-minus one hour before the meeting, and we park at a local health club just around the corner. The team assembles: Ben, George, Tony, Michael and Abdul. All friendly Essex boys. We discuss whether you can spot a pedophile in the street judging only by the clothes somebody wears. Yes, it’s agreed, they wear Slazenger or Lonsdale. We talk about fishing and about how Ben recently visited the no. 2 ranked sushi restaurant in the world.

Time to roll out. We move in convoy, charging down a country lane to the location. Tony and Michael are at the front, connected to us through the hands-free, and they arrive first. “He’s here, he’s here, he’s here,” Tony says. Nick chuckles and grabs my leg, shaking it wildly. We swing in second and there’s the pedophile’s car, with the man sitting behind the wheel. He doesn’t know what’s happening. We park across his front, and Nick rushes out of the van wearing a stab vest just in case things get violent. “Out the car. It’s over.” The man puts his head in his hands.

Nick and I first met last week at Café Brera in Canary Wharf, a coffee spot that he said his wife liked, for a briefing on the operation. We began with some housekeeping. First, Nick said his group prefers “Online Child Protection Team” to “pedophile hunters.” Second, we were not hunting pedophiles, but Suspected Online Sexual Predators. I had to understand that London Overwatch was by-the-books. “What we do has to be done correctly. Stings ruin people’s lives, make no bones about it.”

The sincerity seemed a bit pointless, given that pedophile hunting these days is basically a lawless business. Go on Facebook or TikTok and scroll for a minute, and soon you’ll get a video entitled something like “CHILD PREDATOR GOT THROWN IN THE BUSHES AND SMACKED FOR TRYING TO MEET A YOUNG GIRL” or “PEDO GAVE A LITTLE GIRL FENTANYL AND GOT BEATEN TO GROUND! WATCH TILL THE END!” For years, hunters have been posing as children online, luring predators in chatrooms and posting videos of their stings, but recently the videos have become weirder, darker, better.

Here’s a synopsis of a recent one I saw. A pedophile hunter turns up at a home in Southampton and accuses its elderly resident of being a predator. The old man is confused and scared. He can barely speak. The hunter realizes he has the wrong address, so he runs down the road and knocks on another door. A young guy answers.

This whole encounter is being broadcast via an ultra-high-definition livestream. There’s a camera crew and everything. Tens of thousands of people are watching online. The hunter, it turns out, is an online influencer called Ed Matthews. He became famous a few years ago uploading “vlogs” about his life on to YouTube, but now he’s trying a new type of content.

Matthews stands in the porch and accuses a new person of trying to chat up a child. This guy admits that, yes, he did speak to what he believed to be a fourteen-year-old in an online chatroom, so Matthews calls the police and says they need to arrest the man for child grooming. They wait for the officers and Matthews notices the suspect has a pet cat. He says that he’ll end the whole saga, cancel the police callout and drive right off, but on two conditions: 1) the man eats a bowl of cat food, and 2) he looks down the barrel of the camera and starts meowing to the live audience of 20,000 who have gathered remotely at his porch, and are chuckling along to this sweet justice from home.

American stings are even stranger, of course. “Vitaly,” an LA influencer, recently signed an expensive deal to release pedophile-hunting videos exclusively on a streaming platform called Kick. A typical episode will begin: “What’s good guys? How we looking? Audio working? Eyyyy.” He sits in a classic American diner dressed as a police officer. “We. Are. Back. Let’s go. Holy… Dude. I don’t know where to start bro… This is so cool. Is everything working? We’re back. Today is going to be crazy.”

And it is crazy. Vitaly usually stings three people each episode, and he invites celebrity guests on to the show. In one episode he hires Akon, an R&B singer, to perform “Locked Up” — the 2004 lead single from his debut album Trouble — while in the background police officers arrest a suspected pedophile that Vitaly has caught. Vitaly dances next to Akon while dressed as a Native American. I’m not sure why. All of his videos are sponsored by Stake, a gambling firm owned by the same guys who founded Kick. In another episode, when Vitaly stings a man at a table in the diner, the salt and pepper shakers have the Stake logo stuck on the side.

Nick insisted his ops were nothing like Ed’s or Vitaly’s. Suspected Online Sexual Predators are horrible people, he said, but once London Overwatch stings them, they’re offered a seat in a camping chair (I later learned Nick’s team call it “the nonce chair,” but they’re a bit off-message) and they are asked if they want water and something to eat. Someone from the team then calls the police. Like all pedophile hunters, Nick livestreams an interview with the suspect during the wait. He said this is an essential part of the process — the shame of being outed as a pedophile discourages would-be future offenders. Other teams also often see the videos and get in touch with London Overwatch to say their decoys have spoken to the suspect too. Everyone hands their chat-logs over to the police, who build a case and prosecute. None of this is entrapment, by the way. The Sexual Offenses Act 2003 makes clear that you only need to “reasonably believe” the person to be under sixteen for any kind of sexual communication to be a crime.

Nick has a rough formula for his interviews. He points a phone at the suspect and asks: why did you do it? Have you done it before? Did you know they were underage? They are broadcast live to the 60,000 people who follow London Overwatch’s Facebook page. Facebook users post comments such as “Well done everyone involved in catching this vile creature <3” and “Vile potty mouth pervert! Pair of scissors and everything off. Well done team, great sting thank you!” Nick put it well: “It’s like being in the stocks.”

He explained all this to me, sipped his cappuccino — and I laughed. It was quite funny to be sitting there talking about hunting pedophiles over milky coffees in Canary Wharf. Nonce chair, cat food, Akon. A few years ago, sting videos were sad and dull, but now they’ve got a set, stars, opening credits and a narrative arc. The most wretched crime has become funny. I get the impression that Nick enjoys himself on the stings, even though he says he doesn’t. He teases and laughs at the suspect a bit. Pedophile stings are a nice reassurance that you’re living your life properly. You’re not that pedophile.

The man is in the chair now. The boys are standing around him in a horseshoe, and Nick is livestreaming while we wait for the police. I’m just next to the suspect, but I get the video up on my phone. 815, 833, 880 viewers. “Can’t hear the beast,” someone comments. Real-life onlookers are gathering now too, pointing and smiling. It’s a moment of horrid joy.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.