Volunteer jailbait helps snare Internet predators

Perverted Justice members are chat-room sentinels

The wits of Xavier Von Erck, a computer nerd 3,000 miles from Johnston County, enabled sheriff's deputies to capture a man they said was trying to lure a 14-year-old girl for sex.

David Wayne Forsyth, a 44-year-old computer analyst from Four Oaks, blew off work Thursday to have sex with an imaginary girl he'd been chatting with over the Internet, said Tammy Amaon, spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Office. If it weren't for Von Erck, founder of the volunteer predator watchdog group Perverted Justice, sheriff's detectives might never have known Forsyth was looking for a sexual rendezvous with a child.

Von Erck said Perverted Justice, a West Coast-based foundation that empowers volunteers to hunt for child predators in local chat rooms across America, flagged Forsyth for Johnston County authorities. The group claims to have exposed hundreds of child predators to police since 2003.

The foundation started when a group of friends became tired of molesters infiltrating chat rooms in Portland, Ore., to meet kids. Von Erck, 27, decided to give up his job offering tech support for tax software programs and started pretending to be a vulnerable child on the Internet.

"These places are cesspools," Von Erck said Thursday from his home base in Portland. "We wanted to create a chilling effect and scare off the opportunists."

After getting the tip from Perverted Justice several months ago, Johnston County investigators staged a fake relationship with the imaginary Greensboro teen. Over months, they tricked Forsyth, a married father, into believing the girl would have sex with him.

Forsyth is now behind bars in the Johnston County jail, charged with soliciting a child by computer to commit unlawful sex acts. If convicted, he could spend up to eight months in prison. Detectives seized Forsyth's home and office computers Thursday afternoon to search for more evidence of preying on youth.

Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell said his department is working a number of child predator cases and declined to reveal exactly how they're capturing suspects.

120 convictions

For Perverted Justice, Forsyth's arrest was another notch in the young organization's belt. All told, Von Erck says his group has enabled the convictions of more than 120 predators from California to Florida; the inventory is posted on its Web site. A team of 80 volunteers -- a mix of stay-at-home moms, college students and retired police officers -- spend days and nights luring predators into damning exchanges.

The arrests of some have been caught by a national television crew; "Dateline NBC" turned to Von Erck's foundation last year to pilot a program in which correspondent Chris Hansen confronts predators when they show up for rendezvous with children.

Regional chat rooms in more than half the country are covered by Perverted Justice's volunteers; a few thousand more volunteers are being trained to pose as children in chat rooms. On occasion, they've been accused of being vigilantes. A Texas prosecutor committed suicide last fall when police went to arrest him based on evidence gathered by Perverted Justice.

Von Erck offers no apologies for his group's tactics. He views his foundation's work as a social service. He keeps plugging, knowing that his volunteers will never be able to catch all who use the Internet to prey on children. Their gig is well-known now that the most timid among predators have given up trying to lure a child on the Internet, Von Erck said. For others, nothing short of an arrest will stop them, he said.

"We still have to deal with the hardcore pedophiles," Von Erck said. "These are the older, creepier kind, and our work gets harder. These are the guys who will never have fear."

Schoolyards to Web

As Internet use grew over the past decade, child sex predators swapped the schoolyards for chat rooms in search of victims, police and child advocates said.

"Now, these people are in your living room, or worse, in your child's bedroom," said Barbara Black, who runs a nonprofit group in Smithfield called Kids Come First. The group teaches parents and children about protecting themselves from predators.

In most groups of middle and high school students that Black teaches about Internet predators, at least half have already been inappropriately contacted by a stranger online.

Black checked it out herself, posing as a 13-year-old girl on a Pokemon cartoon Web site. Within seconds, Black said, at least 20 men sent her private messages asking personal questions.

In most cases, though, the stranger's contact with a child starts innocently enough. "Do you have your own computer in your bedroom?" he'll inquire. "Your parents work all the time?" he'll ask. For a needy child, the attention is often welcome, Black said.

The "infamous words 'I love you' to the lonely child is sometimes all it takes," Black said.

(News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)