Very good idea

Very good idea

'Wave, you're on Catch a Perv!' Two students have set up an internet chatroom that catches out men making sexually explicit advances to someone they believe is a 13-year-old girl. Entrapment, or a public service? James Silver reports Thursday November 16, 2006 The Guardian 'Hot Phil" sits in a squalid-looking bedsit, pecking at his computer keyboard as he logs on to the internet chatroom. Scouring the names and profiles of those online, he homes in on someone called "Lucy Star". He then types out his own profile, describing himself as "male with short hair, slim build, tats [tattoos] all over and body tanned". Helpfully, he also uploads a couple of pictures of himself. The shape of his shaved head makes him look faintly reptilian. A can of lager and packet of tobacco sit on the desk in front of him. He asks Lucy if she wants to chat. Within seconds she responds: "asl?" - chatroom speak for "Age, sex, location?" Phil replies instantly. "39 MALE SURREY. U?" So far, so banal, as so many chatroom encounters tend to be. Except that "Hot Phil" already knows Lucy's age. From her profile on the website, it is clear she is only 13. And that seems to be exactly why Phil is targeting her. "DO U LIKE OLDER MEN?" he asks, following it up quickly with "R U ALONE IN THE HOUSE?" When Lucy admits she is, Phil goes for broke. "WOT SIZE BOOBS R U? Then: "CAN U TAKE YOUR TOP OFF AND EXPOSE YOUR BOOBS". After several minutes of increasingly sordid messages, Phil asks if his young victim has a webcam - and, if so, will she turn it on for him? "No soz [sorry]," says Lucy. "i neva go first. U could be rly rly [really really] old'. Desperate to win her trust, Phil turns on his own webcam. "Now u," he demands. She then asks him to wave at the camera - and when he does, Lucy has achieved her goal. Turning on her webcam, she watches as Phil's face darkens with horror and he scrambles for the off-button. "Smile for me!" types Lucy, before adding: "Welcome to catchaperv.com". "Lucy Star" isn't a 13-year-old girl at all. In fact, "she" is two male 23-year-old students, Gary and Ash, who congratulate themselves on another job well done. Fearing reprisals from the men they unmask, Gary and Ash want only to be identified by their first names and decline to have their pictures taken. They launched Catchaperv.com two months ago from a sofa in Gary's mum's lounge in a suburban Home Counties semi. The first website of its kind in Britain - there are several in the US - Catchaperv is a 21st- century version of the medieval stocks. It features a rogues' gallery of "perverts" alongside transcripts of their sexually explicit advances. "The website does not claim any persons shown on the site are paedophiles," announces the site's homepage. "It is clear, however, that the behaviour demonstrated is unacceptable." Visitors to the site - 57,000 so far - can post comments about each "perv" and award them stars. So far Gary and Ash have caught 30 men - "Hot Phil" was "Perv # 00027". "The idea came to us when we were having a laugh on the computer one night going into chatrooms under made-up names," says Gary. "We were shocked by just how many men approached us when we posed as a 12- or 13-year-old girl and decided we would try to do something about it." "Hot Phil" wasn't the only man the pair caught on the night they gave me a demonstration of their site. Within seconds of "Lucy Star" logging on, messages were flooding in. A few were from other kids, but most were sent by older men. "They can all see from our profile that we're 13," Ash reminds me. "We repeat our age to the ones we get talking to." A message flashes from someone called "Puss Lover" asking if Lucy would like to talk dirty to him. Jason, a 36-year-old from Doncaster joins in. He sends Lucy a pornographic image. "He's now asking if we have a picture to send him," says Gary. "We'll say, 'No, sorry, Dad doesn't like me having pictures on the computer'." "He's now asked us, 'Are you a virgin?' We'll try and meander off the subject," Ash says. Another pornographic image pings onto the screen. "He wants to know about Lucy's bra size," says Gary. When he replies with "30A", Jason responds with "nice" and asks Lucy whether she masturbates. Aren't Gary and Ash guilty of entrapment? "No," says Ash, "because we never contact people first. We wait for them to make the first move. I dread to think how many people we could catch if we actually were provocative. It would be in the thousands by now." The messages are coming in thick and fast. Steve from Birkenhead quizzes Lucy about her day at school - whether she has homework and if she likes football - seemingly innocent questions that may have sinister motives behind them, although the lads insist it is too soon to tell. "You get two kinds of perv," says Ash. "You get the ones that go straight into the sex questions, and the ones that seem a bit more cunning and ask about homework. Jason is definitely the sex kind and Steve is more of a groomer." Steve invites Lucy to start viewing his webcam feed and Gary accepts. Steve is mid-30s, baby-faced and wearing large-framed glasses. Jason, meanwhile, asks what underwear Lucy has on. "I think we've got more than enough on Jason to go straight to 'the reveal'," says Gary. This part usually follows the same pattern, Ash says. The man in question asks Lucy to turn her webcam on. Her reply amounts to, "Yes, but you first". Nine times out of 10, the man, who is by now desperate to see his young prey, blinks first. Gary and Ash then ask him to wave at the camera, to confirm that the person on the screen is the one who has been bombarding them with sexually graphic messages. Then comes the "reveal" - a gesture intended to ridicule the man. "We usually get them to do something that humiliates them, like do a little dance," says Gary. "Then we'll turn the camera round on ourselves and wave back at him. Here goes!" The catchers count to three and turn their webcam on. They jeer and wave at Jason and his expectant face turns into one of sheer horror. A torrent of curses follows, as his webcam snaps off. But it's too late. Gary has saved the footage as well as the transcripts. Soon Jason will enter their gallery as "Perv # 00028". "That's the deterrent," says Ash. "When people see that if they try this kind of thing they might bump into myself and Gary rather than a 13-year-old girl, it will make the majority think twice." The authorities are less convinced. The Metropolitan police child abuse investigation command is investigating "all aspects" of the site and its content. "We believe the use of the internet in this way is irresponsible. As well as trivialising a very serious issue, such a website is also at risk of compromising policing operations and it exposes the public to indecent material." John Carr, an internet expert from the children's charity NCH, agrees that "vigilante websites" are not the way to deal with such men. "However noble the motives of these young lads, they are just amateurs dabbling at this," he says. "They could be driving the perpetrators underground where they can't be monitored. "We should also bear in mind that more than 30 men killed themselves after being arrested or investigated as part of Operation Ore [Britain's biggest investigation into the downloading of child pornography] and as a result the police have developed anti-suicide procedures. It is likely some of the men named on this site will be very shocked and there is no knowing how they will react. From the transcripts it is clear what these men were up to, but that shouldn't make them the subject of lynch law." In America there are claims that a number of men have been attacked as a result of appearing on sites such as catchaperv.com. Are Gary and Ash concerned about reprisals against those they expose? "We don't support any form of violence," says Gary. "By all means support the site, but please don't do anything about it if you think you know somebody who appears." I contacted several of those named and shamed by Catchaperv.com, but only one replied. He wrote: "I admit I made a terrible misjudgment on the evening I was trapped, but I emailed the site operators three times telling them the truth that in fact it was something I had never done before and would never do again. I now live in fear of losing my loving family because of this site." Nevertheless, Gary and Ash say that - although they are happy to cooperate with the police - they have no regrets. "We're not trying to replace the police and we don't support any form of harassment of people who appear," says Ash. "We're simply trying to create a deterrent. We'd rather the site didn't have to exist at all. We'd rather these people weren't so damn easy to catch. But something needed to be done ".