Perverted Justice Foundation, Inc.,[1][2] more commonly known as Perverted-Justice (also known as PeeJ), was an American organization based in California and Oregon which investigated, identified, and publicized the conduct of adults who have used chat rooms and other social media in order to solicit online sexual conversations and in-person meetings with minors.
Their website serves as an archive of collected data on these investigations, which they make available in order to assist law enforcement and the public in understanding the behavior and child grooming techniques of online hebephiles.
The activity of the Perverted-Justice organization included online volunteers carrying out sting operations by posing as minors (the age range portrayed by the decoys is usually 10–15) on chat sites and waiting for adults to approach them.
[4][5][6][7][8][9] The site additionally attracted media attention, both laudatory and critical, as a result of their collaboration with Dateline NBC on a series of televised sting operations called To Catch a Predator.
The data they proposed to compile and make accessible on the website, including thousands of formerly unseen chat logs, is available for research purposes in order to assist anti-pedophile groups and law enforcement with regard to understanding the behavior and techniques of online pedophiles.
Before Perverted-Justice's "Information First" program and cold-calling policy became standard, logs that received no interest from law enforcement agencies were posted directly to the website.
In November 2006, after the site's 100th conviction, Perverted-Justice announced that chat logs would no longer be posted unless law enforcement was involved first, as "Information First" agreements were sufficient to cover most U.S. residents caught in a sting.
The complete unedited chat logs, which usually contain sexually explicit content and obscenities (and sometimes are annotated with comments from the Perverted-Justice volunteer) are now posted to the website only after the person's legal case has been resolved.
In a process called "Follow-up," additional volunteers on the site's forums, operating under rules and restrictions set up by Perverted-Justice administrators, will contact the target's family, friends, neighbors, and employer to alert them to the website posting.
The first of these events were conducted in late 2003, in co-operation with investigative reporter John Mercure at Milwaukee's WTMJ-TV, whom the site credits with initially conceiving the concept.
In November 2004, the site teamed up with Dateline NBC in New York City to conduct a large sting operation, or "group media bust," entitled To Catch a Predator.
Dateline rented a house and wired it with hidden cameras, while volunteers posed as minors in chat rooms, telling users who talked to them that they were home alone.
[34] Since then, the To Catch a Predator series of reports has grown into a widely recognized phenomenon, with busts all over the United States and numerous references and parodies in the media.
According to Von Erck, Bruce Raisley, a private pilot and software developer made graphic violent threats against Perverted-Justice contributors and volunteers, and threatened to expose the online identities they used when posing as children.
Allegations were made that Von Erck had "set out to destroy [Raisley] by posing as a woman, seducing him online with graphic sex chats, posting the transcripts on the web, and threatening to release a purported video of the individual masturbating.