My mission to hunt down the vile sex predators targeting children on the web

Some contain suggestions so revolting they leave her physically sickened. 

Senders can be aged from 20 to more than 60, from anywhere in the country. 

What they all have in common is that they believe Lucy is a 12-year-old schoolgirl. 

But the Lucy they have befriended online doesn’t exist. 

In fact, she is an articulate woman in her 40s with a partner, two children and two stepchildren, who runs three businesses. 

She is also a decoy, who devotes hours every day to gathering evidence against sick predators who prey on vulnerable, under-age children. 

Lucy*, who lives in Hertfordshire, became a member of an online paedophile hunting group seven months ago, first helping survivors of grooming and then becoming a decoy and a “hunter”, going out on stings to confront targets. 

There are now around 100 groups across the country whose online chat records, according to a BBC investigation, have been used to track down and charge more than 150 suspects. 

Lucy’s chat logs have been presented as evidence in three cases where a suspect has been convicted and she currently has a further 47 cases still under investigation by police. 

For the mother of four, being a decoy is an intensely personal, passionate crusade; one only her closest family and friends know about. 

“My stepdaughter was groomed through an app around 10 years ago but it was new territory for the police then so nothing happened and there was no conviction even though we had all the evidence,” she explains. 

“So when I was on Facebook last year and saw footage a friend had shared of a sting operation I thought, ‘that’s what I want to do’. I’d never seen one before but, having gone through the experience we had with my step-daughter, I felt I needed to do this to stop other children being groomed.” 

After finding a group called No More Silent Voices on Facebook, Lucy messaged to volunteer. “Within two weeks of giving advice to survivors, I asked to become a decoy,” she says. 

“I was already fully-trained in child protection and safeguarding through my own businesses and they did a full background check on me before I was shown strict guidelines and rules for setting up a profile.” 

Decoys are not allowed to send a friend request to anyone, they must only accept ones they received. Equally they should never invite men to chat, they have to wait for them to start any conversations first. 

“Everything has to be initiated by the predator and we can’t do or say anything that could be considered entrapment, such as start a sexual chat or send indecent images, because we need a watertight chat log to be able to convict,” she explains. 

Lucy set up two Facebook accounts using photos – given with consent – of an adult who is now over 18, showing them as a 12 and 13-year-old child, fully-clothed and in a non-provocative pose. 

“Then I just ‘friend requested’ another decoy and went to bed. When I woke up I had over 100 friend requests. They must have sat there going through the other decoy’s list of friends and found me. I was so shocked, I felt sick. Even now I still get around 16 new friend requests every day.

“It doesn’t look like an adult in the photograph and the minute you click on the profile it has the age clearly written, so they can’t have the excuse that they don’t know how old ‘I’ am. They do.” 

That first morning Lucy felt overwhelmed by the volume of men wanting to befriend her: “But by then I’d made my mind up that’s what I wanted to do, so I talked to the head decoy and she gave me examples of what to say.” 

Lucy accepted a few from the first avalanche of requests, following the group’s age guideline of men over 20 years of age. 

“From the start I noticed a pattern in how they behave. The ones in their 30s and 40s are the ones who are looking for more of a relationship, in my experience. They come in a bit more softly but turn sexual more quickly than the older generation. 

“The older ones, 60-plus, tend to really groom. You can go for months just talking normally, general chit-chat, then all of a sudden they change. To me, they’re the worst. They’re the ones who make the children feel vulnerable and like they are their best friend – then they turn.” 

In the nine months she has been a decoy Lucy has had three successful convictions, with more than 30 cases pending. 

“The images you get sent are vile, absolutely vile. I feel disgusted seeing them as an adult, so imagine if you were a child and received those?” 

With a 12-year-old daughter, 16-year-old son and two step-children now in their 20s, Lucy is acutely aware of the need to protect children from the online threat. 

Decoy work is the first thing she does every morning, and the last thing every night – even on family holidays. 

The conversations can’t stop or the predators could get suspicious and a months-long operation could be compromised. 

“When I wake up, I log on and it’s ‘ping, ping, ping’ – all the messages start coming through. ‘Hi, are you getting ready for school?’ Can you send me pictures in your uniform?’ 

“If I log on at lunchtime I’ll often get lewd messages and as I’m supposed to be at school in lessons, they wait for breaks to contact me and then for me to get home and it starts again. It’s foul, absolutely foul, and quite distressing.” 

The process is time consuming and Lucy admits it can be very difficult to find a balance between family life and the mission she’s found herself on: “I can be online until 1.30am or 2am some days, because you have to copy the chat logs down in case they suddenly deactivate their account and the evidence is lost. 

But I am so devoted to it. I feel like I’ve found something I can do that makes a difference,” she says resolutely. 

“I think I have become desensitised to an extent, over the months I’ve been doing it, but then I get one so awful it will almost break you.”

Stings happen when the predator arranges a meeting or if the chat has gone on too long and the content has become too extreme. 

“We confront the online predators with the evidence, question him or her and when they admit who they are or we prove they are the person we are looking for, then one of the group will go and call 999 to tell police what we’re doing. We video record it and give the footage to the police officers. 

“We hand over our chat logs and give statements. They arrest the predator and seize all their devices and it goes from there,” says Lucy, who admits the police have mixed reactions to the hunter groups and their use of decoys while some police chiefs have been vocal in their opposition, fearing they could jeopardise surveillance operations. 

Some forces, however, are fantastic, says Lucy. 

“They work well with us and like what we do because we hand them everything on a plate but others make it as awkward for us as possible, which is a real shame. They think of us as vigilantes, which we’re not. We try to do what we do as quietly as possible so no one around knows what we’re up to. My chat log for a case can be 250 pages long – the police don’t have the resources to do what we do. We just want to get these predators to leave children alone and getting them off the streets is protecting a child.” 

Confronting a predator on his doorstep, even with the back-up of other group members, can be frightening: “I have been in some dangerous situations and things have flared up but, for some reason, I haven’t felt scared,” she says. 

“Maybe I should but I’m not. I don’t want them to intimidate me, so I stay calm and just focus on keeping them talking until the police arrive. 

“I also have good security from our team who go with me and will protect me should things get nasty. If needed, we will use security from other online hunting teams. 

We all work together at times as we are all after the same thing, which is to protect our children. 

“The thing that keeps me going at midnight, when I’m listening to something disgusting or watching horrible things, is they’re talking to me and not to a real child. That’s what motivates us all. “Sometimes I’m absolutely exhausted but if they’re still online I wait for them to go to bed first because I think, ‘if I click off now, who are they going to contact next?’.” 

* Name has been changed.

Men taken to court thanks to Lucy’s evidence

Andre Smith created a false identity, Peter Shaw, and friend-requested Lucy via Facebook before taking their conversations on to WhatsApp. 

They were in contact for just under a month when he sent her his address and Lucy’s hunter group confronted him. 

He appeared at Nottingham Crown Court on April 16 this year where he received a community order of 18 months and rehabilitation activity requirement for 30 days as part of an 18-month community order, and sexual harm prevention order. 

He was also placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for five years.

Cainan Bancroft friend-requested Lucy on Facebook believing she was 13. 

He sent sexually explicit messages and a video of himself performing a sex act.

He arranged to meet and was confronted by hunter group members who then called police.

Bancroft, 19, pleaded guilty at Leeds Crown Court to 11 sexual offences. 

On July 3 this year, he was sentenced to two years in a young offenders’ institute, given a sexual harm prevention order for 10 years and put on the Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years.

Darren Volante contacted Lucy on Facebook believing she was a 13-year-old girl. 

He sent indecent images, asked her for images and attempted to meet her. 

Volante pleaded guilty at Swindon Crown Court to four counts of attempted sexual communication with a child under 16, three of attempting to cause a child to watch sexual activity and attempting to meet a child after sexual grooming. 

On June 20, 2018, after hearing he had learning difficulties, he was given a two-year jail term suspended for two years and ordered to attend a sex offenders’ programme.

Police warn vigilantes must follow guidelines

Police forces have expressed concerns over the explosion in the number of hunters, condemning vigilante tactics used by those who don’t follow guidelines. 

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, has said their actions could give suspects “the opportunity to destroy evidence before the police can investigate them” and may lead to diverting significant police resources into protecting suspects. 

The NPCC’s guidance warns that innocent people could be wrongly outed as paedophiles. 

Yet evidence gathered by predator hunter groups operating online is increasingly a part of child grooming investigations across the UK. 

Data from police in England and Wales shows a seven-fold increase in the use of evidence from groups like Lucy’s since 2015. 

Only last month the Police and Crime Commissioner for Nottinghamshire urged officers to form closer relationships with hunter groups. 

The number of groups – now estimated to be around 100 – has grown rapidly over the past 12 months, with decoys engaging with suspected paedophiles. 

They collect online chat logs on social media and messaging apps that are collated and handed over to police. 

Prominent groups include Dark Justice, Guardians Of The North, Predator Exposure and Shadow Hunters UK, as well as Lucy’s group, No More Silent Voices.

A Freedom of Information request this year revealed predator hunter groups’ evidence had been used to charge at least 150 suspects in 2017.

Forty-three police forces in England and Wales were approached to provide data, with 29 responding.

Their statistics showed a greater than seven-fold rise in two years in the number of cases brought, in which the evidence of a hunter group was used in some part, from 20 in 2015 to 150 in 2017. Of the forces that responded, almost half (47 per cent) of the cases in 2017 – of the crime of meeting a child following sexual grooming – used evidence from groups.