Firefighter Nabbed by Cyber-Vigilantes
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

He was a 24-year-old firefighter who was typing away on a computer in the Engine 237 stationhouse in Brooklyn. She was a man in his late 30s who went by the name “Frag Off” and acted in the guise of a 14-year-old Long Island girl named cuteashley4u1990. She was trying to catch him.
“damn ur hot,” she said, typing some of her first words.
“thanks,” he shot back. “what are you doing tonight?”
They first met around 7:15 p.m. on a day last spring in an Internet chat room that caters to adults in the New York region. Their conversations would span a three-day period.
After countless snippets of crude dialogue and playful teases, and an episode in which, wearing only a New York Fire Department sweatshirt, he allegedly performed a lewd act while she was watching him via a Web camera, the two never met at all.
“I’m still hesitant about this whole thing,” he said, typing some of his last words.
“u better come over,” she said, teasing.
Ten months later, the fireman, Ryan Hogan, is fighting federal charges that he attempted to entice a minor under 15 into having sex with him and exchanged obscene material over the Internet. His trial is to begin early next year. If convicted of all charges, he could be sentenced to a fine of up to $250,000 and a term of five to 30 years in prison.
Mr. Hogan was not targeted by the FBI, prosecutors, or other government personnel. Instead, volunteers with a controversial and anonymous network of cyber-vigilantes from around the country confronted Mr. Hogan – in front of a national television audience – and turned him over to federal prosecutors.
They call themselves Perverted Justice, and they are a growing group of 27 clandestine “contributors” and thousands of other unnamed volunteers, who claim to monitor chat rooms across the country. The targets are “wannabe pedophiles,” and to catch them the vigilantes pose as young teenage girls and flirt around chat rooms with screen names such as “sadlilgrrl” and “beccas_bored_again,” trying to trick older men with screen names like “icepirate53” and “Mountaindew63401” into breaking the law.
In the past six months, since they began turning over online conversations and other forms of evidence to law enforcement agencies, the group of volunteers boasts of aiding in the convictions of six men and helping local prosecutors to obtain indictments of 16 others, including military officials and teachers.
The group also claims more than 800 Web “busts,” in which they post the contents of alleged pedophiles’ chat logs, their personal pictures, and biographical information, and then take steps outside the Web to contact the persons’ employers, families, and neighbors through a blizzard of phone calls, e-mail messages, and flyers.
But the group’s most significant achievement to date has not been catching people in compromising activities on the Web. Early this September, the Internet sleuths at Perverted Justice were able to locate a missing 14-year-old in the woodsy outskirts of Tacoma, Wash., reportedly after she left her house to buy a candy bar. When local police used a tip generated from Perverted Justice, news reports said, they found Kylie Larae Taylor, 135 miles away from her home, locked up in the dungeon like basement of a 47-year-old man, Stanley Sadler. He allegedly abducted her, chained her to a wall, cut and dyed her hair, and whipped her in front of several video cameras.
“It was scarier than Hollywood, Dante’s Inferno for real,” Xavier Von Erck, a co-founder of Perverted Justice, said of Ms. Taylor’s abduction. Mr. Von Erck, 25, a part-time computer technician from Portland, Ore., was able to break the Taylor case open by tracking the girl’s movements on a poetry Web site, he said, and then, through some nifty computer work, he was able to locate Mr. Sadler’s online identity in chat rooms and obtain his address.
“This was something anyone could do,” Mr. Von Erck said of locating the girl. “You just had to care.”
As more homes are wired to the Internet at faster speeds each year, missing children and abductions have become a virtual epidemic in America. According to statistics tallied by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, about 797,500 children under age 18 disappeared from their homes last year. That’s 2,100 a day. The nonprofit organization doesn’t keep track of abductions spurred by Internet encounters, but related studies show that about one in five children receives an unwanted sexual solicitation on the Web. Of those children who receive unwanted sexual solicitations, only about one-fourth tell their parents, according to the group.
With millions of younger children using the Internet for the first time each year, Mr. Von Erck said Perverted Justice has filled a niche by turning over cases to law-enforcement agencies that otherwise might not be equipped to investigate them. There are 17,000 police departments across the country. On average, those departments each employ a mere 15 police officers. Even with the increasing number of federal agents monitoring Internet crimes each year, Mr.Von Erck said there are simply not enough eyes on the lookout for predators.
What’s more, he said, the group’s contributors are free to skirt many of the legal constraints that can hamstring traditional undercover agents looking to snare on-line perpetrators. For instance, if a man chatting with an undercover agent pretending to be 14-year-old girl asks if she would like to have sex, the agent is unable to answer in the affirmative, lest the case be dismissed on grounds of entrapment. Mr. Von Erck said. In contrast, the cyber-cowboys at Perverted Justice, who typically go through about a year of in-house training before they are allowed to “troll” in chat rooms, are free to respond to “wannabe pedos” any way they please.
Consider a chunk of the purported chat this spring between Mr. Hogan, the firefighter, and the fictitious Ashley, who told him that she wanted to have sex with him, that her mother was out of town, and that she was skipping school.
“I’ll come over and we can f– each others brains out,” Mr. Hogan is alleged to have written.
“wow. kewl,” the Perverted Justice contributor wrote back. “ill get up at like 8:30 and b ready.”
It is unlikely that people acting directly under the command of the authorities could offer that kind of response without jeopardizing the case.
“It’s a slam dunk,” Mr. Von Erck said of the group’s relationship to law enforcement. “We don’t do entrapment because the wannabes come to us, and we can’t entrap because we’re not actually law enforcement.”
Not everyone sees it that way. Many of the group’s detractors said the tactics Perverted Justice uses to entice wannabe pedophiles can seem just as perverse as the pedophiles themselves. A co-founder of a competing Web-based group, Scott Morrow, noted that most of Perverted Justice’s cases are not referred to law enforcement and hundreds of people have been tarred as alleged pedophiles on the group’s Web site, besieged by phone calls to family members, and harassed at work and at home, without ever being proven guilty in court.
“These are essentially hackers playing computer detectives, taking the law into their own hands, and then deciding what the punishment is,” Mr. Morrow, whose group is called Corrupt Justice, said of the cyber-vigilantes. “Most of the time that punishment is ruining lives.”
Moreover, the director of training for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which employs about 200 federal agents across the country to hunt down cyber-predators in chat rooms, said Perverted Justice’s “aggressive” tactics often go against national standards. By accepting child pornography online from pedophiles to make a better case, the training director, Bradley Russ, said, the contributors at Perverted Justice were themselves possessing unlawful contraband, and federal authorities are now considering whether or not to seize their computers.
“It’s a noble effort gone too far,” Mr. Russ said.
By snaring alleged “wannabe pedos,” he said, the group can make matters more difficult for law enforcement because those cases are tainted by entrapment claims.
An attorney for Mr. Hogan, Dino Lombardi, also said the group’s tactics could undo the prosecutors’ case against his client.
“The way they go about their work, it’s not calculated to obtain convincing or reliable proof of someone’s criminal intention,” Mr. Lombardi said. “At the end of the day, there will be considerable doubt as to whether Ryan Hogan intended to engage in sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl, or that he believed cute Ashley to be 14 years old.”
A spokesman for Roslynn Mauskopf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, declined to comment on the prosecution.
Several times, according to a copy of the three-day chat log provided by Perverted Justice, Mr. Hogan signed on, under the name “Ryan4686” or “Ryan237” after Engine 237, but appeared to express doubts about communicating with Ashley.
“can’t I even get in trouble just talking to you,” he wrote, after they chatted about different sexual endeavors and exchanged numbers for the first time.
“lol no,” she said. “no 1 will ever no silly.” (“lol” stands for laugh out loud.)
“ok,” he wrote back.
Twenty minutes later, Mr. Hogan seemed to change his mind.
“actually you’re too young, sorry,” he wrote. “as tempting as it is. it’s wrong”
“why?” she wrote back. “ur hot.”
“thanks. so are you, but i’m 10 years older.”
“that’s kewl. i like older guys. specially when they’re hot lol.”
“i’m sure, but I’m too old for you, it’s wrong and illegal”
“whatever. it’s not like anyone would no.”
“i would,” he said. “sorry.”
At this point it appeared as though Mr. Hogan had ended his relationship with cuteashley4u1990. He logged out, and Frag Off went “trolling” for more “wannabe pedos.” Typically, he works between two and five alleged wannabes at a time.
Five minutes later Mr. Hogan was back, according to the chat log, sending messages.
“where would we go,” he asked. “i mean, where would we meet?”
“here silly,” she wrote back. “i have the house 2 myself until Thursday.”
“and you want to f– each others brains out?”
“lol sure,” she said. “ur hot … so u gonna’ come over? … what time will u be here?”
“i have to pick up dinner for the fam first,” he said. “probably won’t be there till after 9.”
Again, Mr. Hogan seemed to change his mind about meeting Ashley in person.
“Ahhh s–,” he wrote. “definitely not going to be able to make it tonight. sorry”
“why?” she asked.
“have to go to a wake tonight for a city fireman that died the other day.”
Two hours later, he seemed to have changed his mind. Again. He seemed to have missed her.
“still want to …?”
“ashley?”
“guess you’re not interested anymore”
“ashley?”
“hello?”
Mr. Hogan would first learn that Ashley was a fake, and that he was facing criminal charges, from news staff from the “Dateline NBC” program, who staked out Engine 237, and internal investigators from the city’s Department of Investigation, who began asking him questions.
Mr. Hogan’s defense, in the words of his attorney, has been that his intentions were “fantasy.”
“Perverse fantasy,” Mr. Lombardi said, “but still fantasy.”
Mr. Hogan still works with the Fire Department but has been reassigned to administrative duty, according to the department. His trial is scheduled to begin in March.