We have undertaken a massive effort to rework how we bring on new volunteers to learn how to do the chat-logs that you see on the website. From learning how to collect evidence in a professional and credible manner to learning how to chat with these individuals to secure an arrest, our online e-learning program will help out.

Anyone is eligible to apply given that they're over 21 years of age with a clean criminal background. Full details can be found at the following link: Application Information

We're very proud of the work that has been done to totally overhaul and simplify how we bring on volunteers. Our new training academy is a serious step-up in processing volunteers to do chat-logs that bring in results. Please have a read of the page today and see if volunteering with us to try to help deal with internet predators online is something you're interested in.

New Canadian resource profiles pedophiles

Over the years, Canadians have been asking how to help out, or for links to resources regarding pedophiles and other sexual offenders against children. Recently a pretty good resource was launched in Canada as detailed in this Ottawa Sun article: Convicted Pedophile Outing Website Goes Live.

The website, StopPedophiles.ca, is set up with resources for Canadian parents and links to identities of convicted pedophiles set up by province, and each listing has articles to media stories regarding the individuals abuse case.

Canadians should check out the site and support greater efforts to drag the culprits of such abuse out into the sunlight.

Dangers on the 'net not so obvious to parents

When it comes to the internet, today's parents have probably the most difficult time in the history of the internet when it comes to protecting their kids online. Despite all of the press and attention the issue has received, the dangers online towards children are varied and most often, unexpected.

The common refrain not to allow your kids into chat-rooms or use webcams is a good one, but with the rise of social media, a new set of dangers have arisen. People think their Facebook profiles or their twitter profiles are benign, or that discussion websites their children visit are safe because the websites don't look like an overt threat.

An illustration of the above comes in the recent controversy over the website Reddit, a popular discussion and news aggregation tool. It recently got a lot of attention regarding it's hosting of a pedophile forum which features promotion of sexual acts with children and the sharing of images of children stolen from social networking websites. A decent write-up of the controversy is found here: Jezebel.com on Reddit's pedophile community. Reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a company that publishes a large amount of magazines and websites.

It used to be that pedophiles had to hunker down on their own sites, with web-services emanating from Russia or the Middle-East. However, in recent years, ethical business practices from US companies have eroded and pedophiles have found themselves welcomed on services such as Reddit, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, and numerous other online outlets. Google, as an example, refused to take down blogs advocating the molestation of children on blogspot, defending such verbiage as "freedom of speech."

While we at Perverted-Justice.com are quite happy we have protection against government encroachment of our right to free speech, we urge readers of this website to never let such false arguments from companies sway them. There is no right of free speech on private business servers. Reddit, Facebook, Google and the like all have terms of service. They choose not to restrict pro-pedophile viewpoints, it has nothing to do with upholding the bill of rights.

The problem for parents is pretty simple. Due to online companies no longer having the ethos to remove viewpoints advocating the molestation of children, and in Reddit/Conde Nast's case... even stolen images from actual kid's social media used by pedophiles on the website as masturbation material... there isn't a silver bullet to tell parents to watch out for. The old advice to keep them off webcam and out of chats still holds true, but it simply isn't so simple anymore.

While it's impossible to keep your kids off of social networking websites and all the various websites that can have dangers on them, we encourage parents to have frank and open discussion with their children alerting them to the fact when they're online, they should be guarded. Whether it's what they post on facebook to what they write on twitter, parents need to take an active role in monitoring their kids online.

These problems have always existed online, but in recent years the pervasiveness of them can only be directly attributed to the complete withdrawal of online companies from their responsibility of restricting and removing pro-pedophile viewpoints. Be safe online and make sure you're taking an active role with your children's internet activities, as now companies simply are not going to do their ethical and moral responsibility as they have done in years past.

Helping to clean-up social networking pays off

Since March 2007, volunteers on our official forums have been tasked with scouring Myspace and Facebook for sex offenders using those services. Many sex offenders get restrictions on their internet usage not to mention that both websites will remove sex offenders if they are reported to them.

Since 2007, we've been working on identifying sex offenders on Myspace and in 2008, we expanded that effort to Facebook. The results? Sadly staggering. At the end of 2010, the numbers break down as follows...

- Myspace
10,746 known sex offenders deleted since 2007

- Facebook
2,800 known sex offenders deleted since 2008

Both companies have been helpful and responsive towards removing danger users from their communities. The increase in Myspace offenders against Facebook offenders is simply due to the fact that it's harder to identify sex offenders on Facebook than Myspace due to Myspace having better search options.

At the end of the day, whether it's a large social networking website like Myspace or Facebook, or a smaller social networking website... letting your kids have strangers as friends online is just as foolish as telling your kids to hang out with strangers in your local parks. The numbers we've helped remove are very large, but larger still are those that remain out there.

You can help out with our clean-up efforts by registering for the forums and visiting the "clean-up" section to volunteer.

Results in Petaluma? Ask the police yourselves!

It is rare, but sometimes journalists just do what we've always said they should do... if you want to know about Perverted-Justice.com and our work, ask the police that we work with about it. That's what Dan Johnson of the Petaluma Argus-Courier did and the results? Predictable.

His article title says it all: Police laud impact of sex sting - Petaluma Argus-Courier

Fact is, when you talk to police that have first-hand knowledge of how we work and our methods, you will find the consensus result that this article found. We bring effective tactics and quality manpower that reduces the viability of their community as a destination for internet sexual predators. It's rare to see a journalist stick to the facts and talk to people with first-hand direct knowledge about what we do. How refreshing!

We'd like to thank the Petaluma police force for their outstanding partnership during that sting operation and for their open honesty when asked about the results of that work.

Perverted-Justice.com: 500 convictions!

Many years ago when we started doing what we do, long before the Dateline NBC shows and before the issue of internet predators was as "known" as it is today, some people who thought we were "uppity civilians" said we'd never get a conviction. Not a single one, let alone two, or a hundred, or five hundred. The refrain was always that working on and helping to get convictions was impossible since we ourselves are not law enforcement. Well, it's December 2009 as of this update and we have hit our 500th conviction.

Statistically, we've averaged a conviction every four days for the last five years and six months since our very first conviction. That is an enormous pace to maintain and it's taken a lot of work over the years, but it has all been worth it. Each predator out of the darkness and onto RSO registries and this website is another predator families and communities know about. Each one kept locked away is one that has no chance to re-offend during that time.

A myriad of volunteers has helped us get to this milestone. They range from phone verifiers who call up predators while sounding underage, further establishing recorded intent... to content creators who spend every month pumping out creative ideas to add to our underage profiles, making sure that we're always "current" with a changing internet. Our researchers have tracked down individuals that for whatever reason didn't show, but who we knew were potentially molesting someone... they've performed so well that even NBC decided to just go with what we had in-house than have their own identity research team put in place for "To Catch a Predator" episodes. Of course, our people who conduct the chats, chat-log contributors, who logged the bland and boring hours talking to these cretins... we've had many contribute to this milestone and it's been a ton of work for them as well.

Over the last five years, inane criticisms and blatant stupidity hurled at us have evolved and changed over time, new volunteers have arrived and left, cycling through various stages of burn-out, our foundation itself went from being slapped together with a pro-active idea to a federally registered non-profit... but one constant that has not changed is that we have tactics and training that gets results across the entire country.

In the future, we will leave this milestone behind as we have left all milestones, we will continue to work on quality cases and we will continue to log convictions in our archives. Thanks to everyone who has volunteered and helped us achieve this goal... and thanks yet to those who will help us hit further statistical milestones in the future!

Note regarding site impersonators

Putting up a quick note that if you have come to this website because someone has contacted you randomly claiming to work for our organization, then you are dealing with a scam artist who has recently gone around attempting to extort money out of individuals online, claiming that the person will be put up on our website if monies are not paid to them.

If anyone contacts you with such a scenario, they are breaking the law and you should immediately contact police regarding the extortion attempt. Our organization works with police to get sexual predators arrested, we do not appreciate attempts by scam artists to use our name in order to make a quick buck. Pay them nothing and call the police to report any attempt at extortion.

Speaking from experience in getting internet predators arrested... no matter the medium involved in the online criminal attempt, servers such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Google will work with police to track people who break the law down for arrest and prosecution.

Long-time harasser finally arrested by FBI

June 2009 marks the announcement of a arrest of a different flavor. Back in 2006, we wrote an article called "Ten things you likely don't know about Perverted-Justice.com." In the article, we wrote about how we may be the most harassed organization online. A snippet from the article...

"Since then, websites have sprung up to libel and harass us. Haters of what we do have never ceased to stoop to new lows to try to intimidate our volunteers. One such individual tried to pose as a member in chat-rooms in order to attempt to get that person assaulted by strangers. Another member received death threats and warnings that they will be beaten with a baseball bat."

A man who did much of the above, Bruce Raisley, was arrested by the FBI. Raisley had signed up for our forums in 2004 and made negative attacking posts about what we do. We removed him from our community. What followed was a campaign of harassment, threats and online attacks that have still not even ceased with his arrest today. Raisley would viciously attack our volunteers verbally and tried to pose as one of our staff in a chat room in order to get that person attacked. Luckily, these idiotic tactics failed and no harm came to our volunteers... but the intent was the same regardless.

When Raisley's escapades were covered in the press, he then moved to set up a bot-net in order to conduct distributed denial of service attacks against our organization and several media outlets. Traffic ranged from 216 gigabytes a day and sometimes went up as far as over 1 terabyte in generated traffic over a 24-hour period, depending on the size of the bot-net infections. At any time there may be between 100-200 requests to surges of over 10,000 different requesters at a given time. We block usually on average 500-2,000 ip addresses making requests from the bot-net daily. To sum it up for those who read the above and see mostly gibberish, the scale of the attacks is quite massive.

While we have mitigated most of these online electronic attacks with good coding, the cost and time spent defending the website against such harassment is always annoying. We've had to cut off access to most European countries because of the number of computers he was able to infect with his attacks. His arrest, unfortunately, has not put his bot-net out of commission. Truly, we may deal with these electronic attacks forever.

Today Raisley faces up to ten years in jail for his actions. We're quite pleased that he has been arrested, though dismayed that it took so long. We had supplied law enforcement with details regarding Raisley's online crimes years ago, but it wasn't until he attacked large media entities that anyone could get his case taken seriously. His case is a great example to internet trolls, griefers and other psychotics that DDOS attacks are quite illegal and carry a heavy cost once you're caught.

Hopefully the arrest of Raisley and people like him will signify that law enforcement takes internet harassment and electronic attacks more serious today than was the case just a few years ago.

Working hard and consistently

We're working hard and consistently, just under the radar. While we're best known for the series of specials we did with Dateline NBC called "To Catch a Predator", we existed for years prior to that series and have worked consistently before, during and after filming of specific investigations.

Currently we have volunteers doing decoy work across the United States and a cadre of volunteers working to support them both via this project and other projects our foundation has put together. Quiet on our main page means nothing, the real work and updates happen on our volunteer forums.

As always, we're a volunteer organization so if you have some time on your hands and want to help out... dive in feet first. Check out our non-profit foundation portal page at PJFI.org for more information on how to get started, as well as more information regarding our various projects online.

Must-read article in LE Technology Magazine

For anyone following what we do, there's a must-read article in Law Enforcement Technology Magazine over at Officer.com. They go in-depth into what we do, talk to the law enforcement that has knowledge of working with us and covers all the issues surrounding what we do, from the much-ballyhooed "entrapment" claims that the general public doesn't understand much about to what we bring to the table for law enforcement stings in general.

If you want to hear about what we do from law enforcement that has witnessed first-hand what we do, check out Internet Watchdogs - Officer.com. If you've ever had questions or even, gasp, uneasy qualms about what we do... well, it's the article for you. This is pretty much the only article and reporter who has ever actually talked to police regarding the work we do.

We've been saying it for a long time and proving it even longer, our operations are professional, effective and one of a kind. Thanks to those in law enforcement for stepping forward to tell the world what it should already know: We build quality cases that stand up in court, we're professional and we work. It is simply too bad more reporters don't search out the police we have worked with to find this out for themselves.