The Toronto Star
VANCOUVER — A vigilante trio of teenagers dressed up in superhero costumes have had their form of justice shut down by the RCMP after they set up sting operations to catch men wanting to have sex with teenage girls.
The teenagers — dressed as Batman and the Flash — pretended to be 15-year-old girls online and posted videos of their confrontations with men arriving at rendezvous points.
Using fake pictures they got from the Internet and going on the dating website Plenty of Fish, the teenagers started online conversations, claiming they were teenage girls, and arranged to meet the men in public places such as parking lots or restaurants.
The teens then confronted the men and accused them of being pedophiles while filming the encounter. The videos were later posted on YouTube under the header “To Troll a Predator.”
“You Plenty of Fish?” asked the masked Batman character in one of the videos taken at night during a confrontation with one man.
“Oh my God, what are you doing?” said the man.
“You just got trolled.”
The trio had picked up a loyal following on YouTube and posted four encounters with men they claimed to have caught. In one video, a man at a playground is confronted by the Batman character.
“You here for the underage girl?”
The RCMP this week found out what the trio were doing and shut down their crime-fighting efforts after learning that the teenagers identified themselves as working with the police.
Investigators are looking into the evidence gathered by the teenagers and have talked to them and their parents, said Cpl. Tammy Hollingsworth with the Chilliwack RCMP. Two of the boys are 17 and the third is 18. All still live at home with their parents.
Hollingworth said that when she first saw the videos, she was surprised.
“I thought, Wow!, and right away thought what are these kids doing? This is a police job, not something they should be taking into their own hands. It’s not something the RCMP would condone.”
The RCMP has used online chats to lure sexual predators disguising themselves as underage girls but Hollingsworth said the environment is controlled.
Not only did the teenagers put themselves at risk but also led potentially dangerous offenders out into the open, said Cpl. Mat Van Laer with the integrated child exploitation unit.
“If you are dealing with someone who has a sexual interest in children, that’s not going to disappear. If we are careless and we are fuelling that deviancy in one shape or form, God knows what may happen,” he said. “You don’t want that type of deviance being enticed.”
The teenagers didn’t have any malicious intent, said Van Laer, but also didn’t realize there would be consequences to their actions.
The police have ordered the YouTube videos to be removed for privacy reasons. Although they were taken down officially, copies have been reposted.
Rosalind Prober, executive director of Beyond Borders, a non-profit that aims to end child pornography, prostitution and trafficking of children for sexual purposes, said Wednesday that the superhero teenagers were trying to do what officials at Penn State failed to do.
“There, people did absolutely nothing to stop sexual exploitation and here we have young people crossing the line into vigilante justice,” she said.
She said she’s not surprised at the support the teenagers are getting online from people who say not enough is being done to jail sexual predators.
Criminologist Sara Smyth, who specializes in computer crime at Simon Fraser University, said the trio discovered what police have long known: that predators are always looking for ways to connect with kids online.
“We know this is prolific on the Internet and these young people may have felt they wanted to take a stand and to help fight for justice and so on,” she said. “But they may also be doing this for some kind of personal gratification that they too could be real-life superheroes.”
A B.C. teen dressed as Batman confronts a man he allegedly lured over the Internet after posing as a young girl.
Copyright 2011 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited