Decoying

Without giving away too many secrets, I'll give you a brief insight into what we do and how we do it! The police only have less than a handful of decoys operating themselves in few forces around the country. Decoys ARE the heart of any group, without them, we would not be able to do what we do. The work and dedication these guys put in is commendable. Decoys tend to have families of their own as well as holding down full time jobs.

Training: All decoys receive training from our experienced decoys, this can last up to 4-6 weeks to ensure that any chats they may have with any online predators are carried out in the correct way. Practice chats occur on a regular basis until trained and any real conversations are checked regularly.

Photos: We only use historic pictures of either ourselves or donated ones showing a child between the ages of 9-14. All photos donated have been given over with consent from the person stating that we have permission to use them for the purpose of decoying. This person also has to be over the age of 18 to give us permission. We do not and would not ever use images of real children now, nor would we use ones downloaded from the web.

Chats: Although these are grown women and men acting as children, the chats from the predators is EXACTLY what they do to real children..your children.

The decoys account remains dormant on many platforms until a person approaches the decoy. Once first contact has been made by the individual, the decoy states their age within the first 3 messages. This then gives the potential predator chance to cease all communication. If the chat continues, the decoy continually states their age throughout the chat. The predators have multiple opportunities to delete and block the decoys. It is very, very rare a person will delete after initially being told the decoys age- but we are extremely happy when it does!

Some chats can last months, this is due to the groomer attempting to gain (what he thinks) the childs trust or it could be that he's very boring but continues to chat until one day something changes. Decoys are sent indecent images and videos, they have to sit through masturbation lessons - sometimes being told to insert objects inside of themselves. All the while, the decoys keep up the persona of a young girl/boy. The chat can go from one extreme to another and it can start at 6/7am and last right through to 2am the following morning. They sit through voice and video calls having to listen to the predator masturbate..all to gain more evidence. Occasionally, decoys phones may be ceased. This is because the police are unable to retreive information from the predators phone or the decoy has been sent child abuse images/videos. If this happens, the chat immediately stops, the phone is turned off and it is taken straight to the station and reported immediately.

No 2 chats are ever the same but the intent from the predator always is.

Sting time: When it is time to sting him/her, a Google Drive is made up for the evidence to be handed over. (Google drives are where we save all information, screenshots of chat etc. These are updated daily with all chats). The logs are checked by the head decoy and hunters to make sure that it is acceptable and that information given by both parties are correct and 100% watertight to secure a conviction.

MG11's: You may have heard about these whilst a sting is being streamed. MG11's are basically witness statements given to the police. Not only do the decoys have to chat and prepare evidence and google drives, they also have to sit (sometimes for what seems like endless hours) typing up their statements to hand over to the police. This has to detail everything that happened from the first message to the last sent,

the messages exchanged, details of images, motivation behind what we do and more. This is then handed over with the evidence pack to the police upon arrest.