Web Sex Predator Watchdogs: Good Guys or Grandstanders?

Michael Seibert had been through this before.

The 26-year-old was arrested in January for allegedly trying to rendezvous with a teenager for sex in Riverside County -- a girl he met online.

This September, it happened again.

Just like last time, the girl online said she was 13, and agreed to meet him, police said.

“r u a cop,” the Anaheim man allegedly typed to “Kiera” on the night of Sept. 3. “I do not want to get cought.”

Just like last time, the “girl” was actually an adult volunteer with Perverted-Justice.com, a website of self-styled watchdogs who masquerade as bait on the Internet to expose what they say are would-be child molesters.

Seibert, a grocery store worker, was arrested Sept. 9 in Long Beach on suspicion of an attempted lewd act with a child under 14 -- the same charge he faces in Riverside County. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

Once an obscure Internet way station for so-called vigilantes, the Portland, Ore.-based Perverted Justice has become a powerful machine for targeting adults whom website volunteers call potential pedophiles, and exposing them to shame and arrest. But its taste for media attention and role of ad hoc police force has brought criticism.

Website volunteers have teamed up with police nationwide to set up clandestine Internet chat-room stings, which are often orchestrated for television cameras, including one in Riverside County for NBC’s “Dateline” in January.

Yet many prosecutors and law enforcement officials refuse to associate with Perverted Justice, concerned about the civilian group’s lack of professional training and knack for attracting the spotlight.

“Do you really want citizen groups running around imposing their own form of justice?” asked Brad Russ at the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a federally funded national network with more than 1,200 affiliated law enforcement agencies fighting predators online.

The founder of Perverted Justice, Xavier Von Erck, boasts of the website’s aggressive tactics and results: volunteers have helped nab scores of Internet prowlers in California alone, with major busts in Riverside County, Long Beach, Petaluma and Laguna Beach.

“There’s no feeling like it when you find a guy who’s molested a kid in North Dakota and then he gets arrested for it,” Von Erck said. “You can’t really compare it to anything else.”

That feeling of empowerment frightens attorney Steve Harmon, who is representing Seibert and four other defendants arrested in the Perverted Justice sting in Riverside.

“When Perverted Justice is out there trolling or fishing for people who may not have had the intention to get into this trouble but are led into it, then I think that’s very disturbing,” said Harmon, who said Seibert has “very severe mental issues,” resulting from a brain injury sustained when he was baby.

“Dateline” used Perverted Justice volunteers in stings -- such as the Long Beach operation in September that netted 38 arrests -- that lured men to houses, where they allegedly expected to meet a teen. Instead, they were greeted by “Dateline” cameras and local police.

“Dateline” correspondent Chris Hansen, host of the popular series, said that since the episodes aired in 2004, he has seen a “shift in attitude” of local authorities toward the organization.

“They’ve gone from being considered a vigilante group to being a watchdog group,” said Hansen, who added that Perverted Justice volunteers are paid consultants to the show, similar to military analysts often used by TV networks.

Internet crimes against children have emerged in recent years as a growing threat. FBI cases opened against online child pornographers and those using the Internet have increased 2000% in the last decade, according to agency statistics. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s cyber tip line fields as many as 140 leads a week concerning enticement of children online.

“We know we’ve got a growing problem, [with] more than enough cases being generated than law enforcement” can handle, said John Shehan, the tip line program manager.

Von Erck, who manages the Perverted Justice site full time, said he started searching for potential molesters about five years ago, after watching men talk up teenagers online in regional forums. The website now claims to have helped convict 87 attempted sex offenders.

Von Erck himself is somewhat of a mystery. A 27-year-old college dropout from Portland, Ore., he said he has changed his name because he associated it with his estranged father. He would not reveal what his name was changed from, or confirm published news reports that he was born Philip John Eide.

Von Erck’s personal page on the website MySpace.com mentions his admiration of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, but his distaste for Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. The president fought the Civil War to preserve his legacy, and both he and King had shameful personal lives, Von Erck said. A Libertarian, he also describes most males as “morons and not worthy of dry spittle.”

In the early years of Perverted Justice, the website posted a slew of details about men whom volunteers suspected of trying to lure children online, including the names and phone numbers of neighbors and employers -- all part of a campaign of shame. Von Erck said such posts are no longer commonplace, and in most cases are removed.

Still, shame is Perverted Justice’s most controversial weapon.

The website includes Web-cam pictures of men masturbating as they allegedly chat with Perverted Justice volunteers posing as adolescents.

About 65 volunteers, screened internally with background checks and oversight by senior site members, pretend to be teenagers in Internet chat rooms, using fictional profiles, slang and misspelled words to portray an adolescent convincingly. Volunteers across the country chat from home; the group’s virtual office allows site administrators to monitor chats on a centralized server.

As conversations progress, volunteers with young-sounding voices take calls from adults wanting to meet a minor in person.

Some of the volunteers are victims of abuse, Von Erck said, determined to prevent others from experiencing the same trauma. Others are retired or former law enforcement officials, or concerned citizens.

The group’s first conviction was in June 2004, the result of a Detroit media sting that year. These days, transcripts of the chats aren’t posted on the website until sentences are handed down.

Critics of the site have complained that many of the website’s reported online “busts” don’t lead anywhere, simply exposing the individual to public ridicule rather than prosecution, or, as some claim, harassment at the hands of Perverted Justice volunteers.

Minnesota kindergarten teacher Julie Cison accused Perverted Justice volunteers of waging an unrelenting attack on her son. According to police reports, her 24-year-old son asked a Perverted Justice volunteer posing as a 13-year-old girl if she liked thong underwear, and then tried to rendezvous with her at the Mall of America. He was never charged or convicted of wrongdoing.

“They’re dirty and they’re underhanded,” Cison said. She has assisted an anti-Perverted Justice website to attack Von Erck’s credibility, because Perverted-Justice.com “is judge and jury over these people’s lives.”

Von Erck disputes Cison’s claims and says the site now works almost exclusively with law enforcement.

Although legal and law enforcement officials agree that eradicating Internet predators is tough, many remain leery of joining forces with the Perverted Justice crew. Because the website’s volunteers are not law enforcement officials, some prosecutors fear that the evidence they collect may be inadmissible in court.

“Why engage in something and devote our extraordinarily limited resources when there may be a problem down the road?” said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. “Why prosecute a case halfway, only to have it dismissed on some legal basis?”

One Perverted Justice target, Philip A. Fay, 31, of Winsted, Conn., was placed on a year’s probation for disorderly conduct after prosecutors determined his 2005 online chat with a “minor” was too vague to prove enticement, said Andrew Wittstein, supervisory assistant state’s attorney in Connecticut.

Perverted Justice volunteers repeatedly tried to persuade Fay to agree to a face-to-face meeting, but Fay never complied -- “a weakness in the case,” Wittstein said.

Fay declined to comment on the incident.

Von Erck confirmed that the group took on a “consultant” role for “Dateline,” drawing their first real income for the online work and hiring an agent. Before then Von Erck survived on a part-time tech support job and modest donations to the site. Perverted Justice is in the process of seeking nonprofit status, Von Erck said.

Riverside County sheriff’s deputies contacted Perverted Justice after watching a “Dateline” sting in early 2004 and organized eight small-scale arrest operations in 2005. In January, the online group and local deputies collaborated to entice scores of men to a house rented by “Dateline” in Mira Loma for liaisons with underage boys or girls, authorities said. The sting led to 51 arrests.

“Nobody can remember anything this big,” said Lt. Chad Bianco, with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, of the massive bust. “They were doing all of the grunt work that is very, very manpower intensive.”

Parry Aftab, an Internet privacy lawyer and an expert on Internet safety for families, said she was skeptical of Perverted Justice’s go-it-alone approach and pursuit of the media spotlight.

“The only good thing that’s come out of [the site] is the fact that parents are a lot more aware now that the Internet boogeyman lives next door,” she said.

susannah.rosenblatt

@latimes.com