The knock on the door came in the early evening, at a housing estate in the Home Counties. Two hours later, the paedophile who answered was in a police cell – his name splashed over the internet.
The 54-year-old bachelor had confessed to using a chatroom to send obscene photos of himself to a schoolgirl. He had also relentlessly pestered the child to send him pictures of her naked body.
‘I was stupid. I made a mistake,’ the man squeaked in a terrified voice as he was snared at his one-bedroom flat by a team of ‘paedophile hunters’ calling themselves London Overwatch.
‘I knew I was taking a risk. I’m sorry! I’ll never do it again,’ he begged, as eight strangers in Barbour-style jackets and anoraks held him until police arrived.
Too late. For several days, from before Christmas until early January, his revolting messages – to a ‘child decoy’ – were being monitored by London Overwatch, who bill themselves as an ‘online child protection’ team.
Bankers, builders, IT experts and housewives by day, in their spare time they snare internet child predators and hand them to the police.
Nick, a 41-year-old finance worker and father of four who runs London Overwatch, tells me: ‘We do it by the book. I have organised 300 stings over the last seven years and handed paedophiles over to hundreds of police officers.
‘The minute we catch the man, at his door or on the street, he realises the game’s up. His instinct is not to fight or run. He goes white, might say he feels ill, and we let him sit down.
Paedophile hunters confront a suspect and tell him their visit concerned a ‘child protection issue’ and he was invited outside to discuss the matter
‘We ask him questions to confirm we have the right person: name, age, marital status. We have to keep him calm and talking until the police come. We don’t want to make him aggressive or anyone to get hurt.
‘Grooming children online is an enormous problem. The police don’t have the money or manpower to chase all the paedophiles. All we want to do is protect young girls, to keep them safe.’
London Overwatch, with 28 members, covers the south-east of England. It is one of scores of paedophile-hunting teams operating throughout the country.
‘There’s a lot of people saying we seek fame and glory. It’s not true,’ adds Nick when I meet him, first at a coffee bar near the City of London office where he has worked since he was 17.
‘We stay anonymous because we don’t want a convicted paedophile coming out of prison and tracking us and our families down. We cooperate with the police. They help us, and we help them.’
The next day he puts me in touch with Tracey, a mother with a professional job, grown-up children and two dogs, who also works for London Overwatch.
She tells me: ‘These perpetrators walk among us. We have caught an undertaker, a finance director, a charity worker, a Welsh church accountant, even two prison officers: men at the very peak of their careers. They have one thing in common: they all think they are above the law.’
Tracey is essential to the operation to catch paedophiles. She sets up the decoys on the internet by creating fake profiles using pictures of herself, female friends or adult women from London Overwatch, digitally altered to look like 13 or 14-year-old girls. These are posted on internet chatrooms.
The images are mundane: no bikinis, school uniforms or revealing T-shirts. Using a pseudonym such as Jane or Katy, the message beside the picture might say: ‘Like horses, hate homework, aged 13.’
That is enough for the men to start messaging.
‘We never lead a perpetrator on,’ says Tracey matter-of-factly. ‘Our [messages] and his messages will be used as police evidence for any court hearing in the future. That information would be worthless if we did anything to encourage him. They have to ‘hang themselves’. We just put up the child’s profile picture, a name and the message – and wait.’
The police officers, a man and a woman, go over to the hunters’ 4×4 and tell the suspected paedophile he is under arrest before he is handcuffed
Sometimes, 350 men will respond to a single photo over just a week.
The decoy girl answers them in very bland language of the sort a child might use. ‘Can’t talk, Mum’s in,’ might be a typical response. If the decoy is asked to show herself naked, the reaction might be: ‘Making tea now.’
Tracey allocates quite a few hours a week of her spare time to this distressing pastime.
‘I come in from work and turn on my burner phone [which she uses for London Overwatch] to hear ping, ping, ping of messages for a full five minutes from the men to the decoy girl. They are paedophiles, scores of them, making contact with an underage child they believe is real.’
Once a predator is spotted online, the volunteers trace his whereabouts thanks to exhaustive internet searches including Companies House records and address databases. This work can take weeks. The team keep a lot of their techniques secret to ‘confuse the enemy’.
As Tracey says: ‘Someone has to do it.’ The police alone can’t be expected to control the epidemic of online paedophilia.
And Tracey adds: ‘It gives my own life extra meaning. These people must be stopped. My family, who know what I do, are fully supportive.’
She often goes out on stings, too.
‘We live-stream the event to protect ourselves and them. We tell the men we are from a child protection organisation and the penny drops. The paedophiles don’t always seem surprised: many now realise that hunters are watching the internet chatrooms.
‘If we go to their house, they normally want to talk away from it – in the car park or the next road – so their wife doesn’t hear the conversation. If the man has a past conviction, their partner may know that; they may have accepted them back in good faith. It is terrible for a woman to be betrayed a second time.
‘The men normally remain very calm. We do nothing to provoke them. We realise that extended families, including children, are affected by the stings we do.
‘We always cooperate with the police. We can get called to give evidence in court. We respect the officers, and they respect us.
‘Sometimes the police come in five minutes; sometimes it takes four hours. The officers who arrive read our file, arrest the paedophile and we go quietly on our way. The man is then in the law’s hands.’
But Tracey adds, with a hint of venom: ‘I can’t feel sorry for these men. They target children for their own sexual gratification.’
The suspect is led away by police officers – the man’s life as he knows it is over. He faces the strong possibility of a prison term
Some hunters’ stings are broadcast online, with thousands watching. The shame of being ‘outed’ as a predator may help to discourage other would-be offenders: rather like being put in the stocks in the medieval marketplace.
No stings by London Overwatch have gone wrong so far, but some others do. A disturbing video online shows a cornered paedophile getting out a knife and slitting his own throat (he survived) as an ambulance is called. He was still convicted.
In America, meanwhile, paedophile hunters often beat up the suspects – sometimes in cases of mistaken identity.
Critics accuse the groups of being vigilantes, but London Overwatch insists that it members are removing dangerous predators from the internet and helping to keep children safe.
Nick, the London Overwatch chief, has a rough formula for his interviews with the perpetrator. He points his phone at the suspect and asks them why they did it, have they done it before and did they know that the child was underage?
He says there is no ethnicity dominating this internet crime. In inner-city north London it is more likely to be South Asians; in a predominantly white area, such as Essex, it is white men.
And so it was at 7.45pm on an ordinary Monday night when I was invited to watch Nick and his team at work.
At the paedophile’s door they told him their visit concerned a ‘child protection issue’ and he was invited outside to discuss the matter.
‘He’ll say he feels ill soon. He will only be pretending,’ Nick whispers as the man is allowed to sit on the floor, leaning up on one of the team’s smart 4x4s in the estate’s car park.
By now the suspect, who works for a catering company, is being filmed. He is told that his messages to a 14-year-old girl have been monitored between December 18, 2024, and January 7 this year. It’s all in the file that Nick brandishes.
The chatlogs show he talked to the girl about masturbation and bestiality. There is a whimpering sound from the man as he admits it all. Then, on cue, he collapses on the ground.
The team rush towards him, filming all the time, and pick him up. ‘Are you alright? Do you want an ambulance?’ The man shakes his head as they lean him back on the car.
The interrogation resumes. ‘Did you think you would get caught?’ asks one volunteer.
‘I knew I was taking a risk,’ answers the man. ‘I just wanted to make friends with her.’
‘Have you done this to kids in the past?’ demands the same volunteer.
‘No’, insists the suspect. ‘I’m not lying. Will I go down [be sent to prison] over this?’
The answer is yes. ‘Some like you have got three or four years,’ respond his interrogators. ‘Consider the family of this little girl.’
By now the man’s voice has a pitiful pleading tone.
‘Have you ever met a girl face to face?’ is the next line of questioning. ‘No,’ he insists. ‘I won’t have a job after this,’ he concludes, looking as though he might cry.
At last, the local police are called on 999.
The officers will do a sweep of the suspect’s flat, taking away his laptop and his mobile (which is still inside), and drive him to a cell for the night before he faces charges within 24 hours.
The electronic equipment will reveal what other girls, if any, he has targeted online.
‘What you have done is really bad. You have messed with other people’s lives. You asked for pictures of her naked. You asked to see her underwear. You said she could make money by sending you the images to sell to other men. When does this abuse become wanting to touch her yourself?’ says Nick to the man as they wait for the police, who suddenly arrive in a saloon car.
By now neighbours are coming back from work and parking their cars. They peep over their shoulders as they walk to their own doors. News of the ‘interview’ is getting round the estate.
The police officers, a man and a woman, go over to the hunters’ 4×4 and tell the suspected paedophile he is under arrest before he is handcuffed. At one stage, a window is thrown open and a male voice shouts: ‘Paedo!’
The man’s life as he knows it is over. He faces the strong possibility of a prison term. All ‘nonces’ – the jail jargon for paedophiles – have a tough time behind bars.
He will lose his friends. His family are likely to shun him. With his name on the Sex Offenders’ Register, his job in the catering industry will end. It is tough retribution. But the chances of him going on to meet a ‘real’ child in the flesh (as online predators often do, with dreadful consequences) have been sharply reduced.
I watch with respect as the self‑styled paedophile hunters melt away into the darkness, get into their cars and go home to their own families as the police car prepares to leave.
London Overwatch has nailed its man. The job is over. Until the next time.
