"When I first got started in forensics, it was when chat rooms and webcams were taking off. Child predators thought they would be able to figure out who was who on the internet since, clearly, you'll know you're webcamming with a 40-year-old dude munching on donuts instead of a 14-year-old girl.
I was a naive 18-year-old woman who was just getting started in policing when I heard a couple people talking about how they were having a hard time chatting up creeps now that webcams were a thing.
I told them, why not just hire someone to act like an underage girl or boy and coach them on what to say and how to set up meetings to catch these imbeciles?
Lo and behold, I volunteered myself for the job. We set up a 'bedroom' in one of the upstairs offices complete with a bed, desk, and some posters from one of the officers' teenage daughters. I had to wear some of my high school sports clothes or pajamas while talking to predators via webcam.
I passed notes back and forth with the team of officers and passed it off as trying to do homework while chatting. The hardest part was that I had to seem interested and innocent while this dude on the screen was telling me what type of horrible things he wants to do to my body thinking I was still a child.
We netted somewhere around 120 men and a handful of women. The most notable were a few clergy, two city councilmen, a state trooper, school teachers, and other people you would just trust around kids.
All of them looked like regular people and seemed like people I would interact with everyday without any idea that they were hunting minors online.
There was only one who got away who I just know went after a real victim - or had already done so already - that really made me worried. He would try and chat off and on when I was on. He got a thrill out of telling me how he would like to tie me up and do all sorts of torturous things to me in great detail.
I actually started crying. He just laughed and said it would be fine after I got used to it.
I don't regret doing this work, but it was quite the mind boggle, especially at 18 years old. I just wanted to keep other people from getting abused and hurt the way I had been as a child. I was just doing my job, even though I was kind of blundering into things way outside of my pay grade."
