Creep Catchers

Creep Catchers are non-affiliated individuals and groups who attempt to prevent child sexual abuse by posing as minors, using chat rooms and dating sites to lure adults willing to meet the minor for sex, and then exposing the adult by publicly posting videos of the ensuing confrontation. Creep Catchers offer the opportunity to make a public statement (a confession and explanation is encouraged) before posting the video and chat logs to a central website and various social media. Cooperative suspects are typically lectured to in relative privacy, while belligerents or those with particularly explicit conversations are loudly shamed and profanely ridiculed. Public and official reactions to groups of Creep Catchers have been mixed, with some supporting the intent of preventing abuse and others noting dangers of vigilantism by untrained public. In 2017, Vice.com produced Age of Consent, a full-length documentary film following Toronto resident Justin Payne, an independent Creep Catcher unaffiliated with other groups of the movement.

In posing as underage children to lure and then confront online predators, the modus operandi of the movement bears similarities to Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator series, but police are not present for the confrontations, which typically happen in public.