Last October, Kat posted a short ad on Craigslist: "Hi I am new in town and looking for people to hang out with. :)" She soon received an email from a man in his mid-thirties, and they started messaging back and forth. He asked for a photo, according to Kat, so she sent him a selfie: a hazy black-and-white shot of Kat smiling at the camera, hair swept to the side, bangs framing her kohl-lined eyes.

They had been emailing for two days when Kat decided to see how the man would react to the news. "Plz dont b mad," she wrote. "I am almost sixteen :)"

Creep Hunter Brendon Brady Kamil Bialous

"So u are quite young," he wrote back, according to Kat's screenshots of the emails. "No prob. Sweet Sixteen coming soon eh?" From then on, Kat's age became a term of endearment for the man, who said he was thirty-five. "Hi Almost Sweet 16," he wrote a few days later. "You are 110 percent very special and it gives me melts of joy to see u sooo happy."

The man grew increasingly eager to meet up, proposing they'd go "someplace elegant" for coffee and dessert, according to Kat's messages. But after an entire month of emails and cancelled plans, he settled for a McDonald's outside of Vancouver, Canada, where they both lived. He still wanted to dress up for the occasion. Before leaving that night in November, according to her screenshots, he sent Kat a photo of himself: black suit, striped tie, purple pocket square. "Cheers n can't wait!!" he wrote her. "So So Happy!!"

Outside, it's wet and freezing. But the man doesn't have a car, so he heads there on foot, walking into McDonald's with a damp head of hair. The place is packed with young families and chattering teenagers. Two men huddle in the middle of the restaurant: Brendon Brady, a skinny dude with a goatee and a blue streak down the front of his hair, and a stockier, middle-aged guy in a polo shirt who calls himself G-Man. Brady and G-Man pull out their phones, turn the video recorders on, and make their move.

A large, soft-looking man in a suit is sitting near the soda dispensers, fiddling with his phone. Brady and G-Man walk over to his table, avoiding eye contact until the last possible second. "I'm Kat," Brady says, pointing his phone at the man's face. "The fifteen-year-old girl you came here to meet."

"Aw, shit—" the man sputters as he scrambles to his feet, backing into the corner.

Brady and G-Man keep their voices low and even, to keep him from running. They promise not to hurt him. Then they go in for the catch. "We're the Creep Hunters," Brady says. "You've been talking to us to the whole time, man."

Canada's original creep hunter wasn't on any righteous crusade; he just wanted to make videos that people liked watching. About four years ago, Justin Payne, a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker in Ontario, was goofing around in front of the camera, doing comedy skits and pranks to post on Instagram and YouTube. "I was trying to get better and better every video, but there was no spark," he said.

Then he decided to try something different: He made a fake dating profile, posing as an underage boy "just to see what would happen." He couldn't believe it when a man actually responded and wanted to meet up, so he decided to tape the confrontation, To Catch a Predator-style, and post it online. The video was Payne's first viral hit, and he kept giving the public what it wanted to see. "I try to pick the youngest age possible," he said. "I want to make it dramatic for the public."

Another young construction worker, Dawson Raymond, had seen a few of Payne's videos and decided to take his stings a step further: In 2015, he teamed up with a friend in Calgary to start a group he called Creep Catcher. Raymond had a more confrontational, in-your-face approach, along with a slogan, "Yer Done Bud!" "I've got over two million views on my Facebook," Raymond told one man as he accused him of trying to lure a 13-year-old girl. "Everyone's going to know who the fuck you are, you pedophile fuck."

"I try to pick the youngest age possible. I want to make it dramatic for the public."

Raymond's rude, rebellious spirit was contagious, and spinoffs soon spread to dozens of cities across Canada, with viewers cheering them on for exposing "goofs" and "skinners"—Canadian prison slang for pedophiles and child sex abusers. While Payne preferred to work on his own, others liked the idea of teaming up to fight evil on the streets, Justice League-style. The informal network of groups has spawned its own subculture, adopting an aesthetic that's part anarchist punk and part Marvel superhero, with a heavy dose of Anonymous, the global hacker group. The members love Guy Fawkes masks, hoodies, skulls, and gothic imagery, and pepper their Facebook pages with sinister warnings ("To catch a wolf you send a wolf"; "We are everywhere!"). But despite appearances, the Creep Hunters now believe it's time for the movement to step out of the shadows: They want to take vigilantism mainstream.

Former Creep Hunter Tyler Fritsen Kamil Bialous

When it aired from 2004 to 2007, To Catch a Predator was an elaborately choreographed TV spectacle: Producers rented a house, where actors hired to play underage decoys waited for the alleged predators to show up. Outside, police were waiting to arrest them for sexually soliciting an underage kid—a crime known as "child luring" in Canada—while NBC's cameras caught everything. But Canada's new predator hunters don't have to wait for a TV network to come calling: They have the cameras in their hands, a captive audience on social media, and an Internet culture that thrives on public humiliation. That was the original draw for Tyler Fritsen, the 30-year-old construction worker who founded Creep Hunters last year after a dispute with the original Creep Catcher: "Public shaming is way better than anything a court can do."

One of the movement's biggest hubs is in British Columbia, where Creep Hunters rub shoulders with Creep Busters, Creep Catchers, and other self-appointed justice-seekers. Though police have misgivings about the groups' tactics, officials have also used the stings to make high-profile arrests in the province: an elementary school principal, a deputy sheriff, a Mountie. ("That guy's a pig!" a creep catcher yelled on tape . "That guy's a cop pedo!") In December, the movement got its first conviction when a 67-year-old Australian man caught in a sting pleaded guilty to child luring and was sentenced to six months in jail.

The movement's home turf, though, is Facebook, where the biggest catches can rack up hundreds of thousands of views and supportive comments. ("hope someone reconizes you disgysting pig wanting sex from a 13 year old. you are sick in the head loser"). One group even composed its own rap song to introduce every video:

Goof! You're subhuman dirt, now we all know

So gross on the website, can't escape no!

You fucked up and be caught on

Creep Catcheeeeers!"

At the heart of the movement is a simple, foreboding message: Children are in more danger than anyone imagines. "Our world's run by a bunch of pedophiles. It's in the churches, in Hollywood," Fritsen said. The Creep Hunters should know: Brady, who now runs the group, says that the majority of members have either been sexually abused themselves, or are close to someone who has been. Fritsen says he was molested by a family acquaintance from the time he was four years old until he was thirteen; the first adult he told didn't believe him. Brady also says that he was victimized as a young child. "I was really scared to talk about it," said Brady, who's now thirty-one. "I buried that demon as deep as I could."

Brady working to set up a catch Kamil Bialous

Brady used to play bass guitar in a hard rock band, and he still has traces of the look: dyed hair, ear plugs, forearm tattoos. He's restless and quick to speak, with a knack for dramatizing stories to make a point. On his very first catch, Brady claims, the guy tried to run him over with a car; he wasn't deterred. "Me getting hurt is a lot better than a fourteen-year-old kid possibly getting kidnapped at one o'clock in the morning," said Brady, who now works in the construction industry. "I'd rather it be me than a child."

The movement has become a media sensation in Canada, spawning a multi-part series and a documentary by VICE Canada. It has yet to take off in U.S, where the public shaming of sex offenders is already embedded in the criminal justice system, media, and culture; perhaps we don't need to outsource it to grassroots activists. As a matter of principle, Canada doesn't push those accused of sex crimes into the spotlight: There, the sex offender registry is only available to law enforcement, rather than the general public. Police don't often release names of suspected criminals until they're actually charged. Even if an accused criminal is convicted, records are notoriously difficult to track down in some provinces. Predator hunting has given an outlet for ordinary Canadians—whether students, factory managers, or construction workers—to act on their fear and disgust.

"Public shaming is way better than anything a court can do."

The adrenaline starts to kick in before the creep even shows up. There's the surreal moment of seeing him in the flesh after hearing his most lurid and intimate thoughts. Then they rush headlong into the unknown: He could be armed. He could be violent. Some run. Others shout. But so many of the guys just stand there, frozen in shock and fear.

That power—the potential to crush someone who seems willing to do the same heinous things that happened to them or someone that they love—can be bracing. It empowers them to change the course of a stranger's life, perhaps irrevocably, because they alone decide that it needs to happen. "It's the thing that actually put value to my life," said Kyle Welsby, a factory welder and the head of Creep Hunters Ontario. "Every job out there, everyone can be replaced. This is something that I could not be replaced in."

But DIY justice can be a messy business. Exposés have quickly morphed into bullying, harassment, and torch-wielding mob justice, fueling a backlash from Canadian media and law enforcement. Critical of what they see as irresponsible behavior by their competitors, Creep Hunters are now trying to clean up the renegade movement and turn it into a more responsible, respectable enterprise: No screaming, no shouting, no profanity-laden diatribes. "We're not a bunch of thugs running all over the place trying to get famous," Brady insisted. In recent months, the group has started distancing itself from the shaming videos that have been the hallmark of the movement, and now turn all their evidence over to the police before posting anything about the catches online, according to Brady; increasingly, they're not meeting their targets at all. The Creep Hunters want to prove that it's possible to be ethical avengers—venturing out of normal civilian life to rid the world of darkness without crossing the line themselves.

Kamil Bialous

Brady wasn't actually McDonald's Man's fake girlfriend. The messages were the work of a forty-one-year-old woman now sitting across from me at a Denny's in downtown Vancouver. "Kat," her nom de guerre while creep-hunting, looks like a pixie warrior—a tiny figure in a knit cap, pink tank top, and nose ring, with rippling arm muscles from her CrossFit obsession. She's married to G-Man, the guy who accompanied Brady to the McDonald's. She would have gone herself, but he'd been stuck at home taking care of the kids, and she thought it would be nice for him to get out.

Hours before the meet, though, McDonald's Man had been threatening to bail. "My boyfriend's frustrating me," Kat complained to Brady over eggs and toast. Kat explained that they had nearly met before, but then his grandmother landed in the hospital ("Very serious n I'll if she dies I won't be able to meet u!!"); she felt bad and backed off for a few days. But her patience was wearing thin. "I'm going to have a hissy fit," Kat told me, then typed a new message to him in the pidgin she uses to impersonate a teenager. "I knew u never wanted two meet me lettin me down just loke everyone else in my life whatev."

The first rule of creep hunting: Play as dumb as possible. "It looks way better if you're just an innocent little girl," Fritsen told me over breakfast the day before. Suppose the guy asks whether you have sexual fantasies about your brother or your dad, he said, switching to the falsetto he uses to channel his decoy Jenn: "Oh my god, what are you talking about? That's gross."

"Every job out there, everyone can be replaced. This is something I could not be replaced in."

The second rule: Don't initiate sexual conversations or be the first to propose meeting up; emphasize your young age repeatedly. (Most of the dating websites and apps they use require users to be of legal age, so the Creep Hunters say they're younger within a few messages.) If the guy pursues their decoy anyway, then he passes the threshold for creepiness; by their standards, he deserves to get caught and is more likely to be convicted if they manage to get him arrested. The Creep Hunters pride themselves on avoiding fishing expeditions, criticizing other groups for sending smutty messages and posting ads in escort sections. But in the end, each hunter gets to decide which creeps to flatter, cajole, and string along. And it's not always clear whose lives are worth upending.

Kamil Bialous

Kat would usually go after guys who were more obvious predators—crude and sexually explicit, conniving and manipulative. But McDonald's Man preferred emoji hearts and flowers; he thought drinking grape juice was reckless because it had so much sugar. I could find only one sexually suggestive email out of the hundreds that he sent to Kat: He wanted to pick out her outfit for their long-awaited meetup. Did she have a pencil skirt, a cashmere top, and "for the nitty gritty lace ( u know) Or thong? ((LOL))" he wrote.

But something about McDonald's Man rubbed Kat the wrong way. He was so insecure, so needy, sending message after message if he didn't hear back—as clingy "as a mollusk," she complained. Would an actual teenage girl even have the patience for a guy like that? I wondered. Kat assured me that he was an expert groomer. A teenage girl would "probably be head over heels in love, and completely enthralled," she insisted, "because someone's paying them attention."

When the real Kat was fourteen, she says, she was raped by an older teenager; according to her, he was charged but never convicted. Then when she was sixteen, Kat ran away to Vancouver and started working as a prostitute, bringing men into rooms above a butcher's shop that were rented by the half-hour. When she tried to escape, she was trafficked across the border to work for an American pimp instead. Her parents found her on the streets shortly before her eighteenth birthday, and her pimp was sentenced to thirteen years in prison.

Kamil Bialous

That was more than twenty years ago. Kat now has her own children, a husband, a life. She recently started working to become a private investigator, racking up training hours to get her license. But when she started watching the predator-catching videos last summer, she knew what she needed to do next.

In their chats, she always tells the creeps the same story: She had just moved to the outskirts of Vancouver, and she wishes she had never come. Back home, she had the forests and mountains; "here I have no one and concrete," Kat wrote to McDonald's Man. Her mother—that "nasty ole lady"—was never home. The teenage Kat is a vulnerable kid, but not a pushover. "She always has a backbone. If they pull attitude, I pull attitude," she explained. The chats can take weeks or months before materializing into a meet. So to make conversation, Kat weaves in little details from her own life: If she is watching "American Horror Story," so is her decoy. "It's easier to keep your story straight" that way, she told me.

Kat's first catch was exactly the kind of guy that the Creep Hunters say they're after. They called him "Creepy Teacher"—a 70-year-old man who fantasized about becoming Kat's live-in tutor, even emailing his resume to show off his teaching credentials. "My lover when I move in to tutor you, you will no longer be alone and you will have encouragement from me always," he wrote Kat, according to emails that she showed me. "Most lovers are only interested in sex but I go further as I am very interested in your graduation and other needs." As the prospect of meeting became more real, his messages grew cruder. Hours before their meeting at another Vancouver-area McDonald's, Kat mentioned that she might bring a friend with her. "Does she know we will fuck tonight and she may participate?" he wrote.

The Creep Hunters want to prove that it's possible to rid the world of darkness without crossing the line themselves.

The teacher was a slight man with wire-rimmed glasses, close to bald, and distressingly ordinary. When Kat and Brady met him, he invited them to take a seat; he didn't yell or shout when they asked him why he wanted to have sex with a child. He just kept shrugging his shoulders until he finally admitted he'd made a "mistake." "An absolute mindscrew," Kat said. That night, Brady couldn't sleep. "No remorse, no emotion about it, no nothing," he said. In an email to me later, the man admitted that he was in the wrong but said the group had no business coming after him. "I got hooked and I apologised. But to [them] I am condemned for the rest of my life…They are judge, jury, and executioner," he wrote me, adding that his health was rapidly deteriorating. "I will cheerfully be happy in my final months to live even [though] others wish me misery."

As shaken up as they were, Brady and Kat parted ways with the teacher without making a big scene. They kept their cool that night. They've seen what can happen if they don't.

The camera panned across the parking lot, then jerkily pulled up to reveal a man in a motorized scooter. Another creep-catching group started accusing the man of trying to pick up a fourteen-year-old escort, streaming the whole showdown on Facebook Live.

"If you give me your scooter, I won't put this up on Facebook and YouTube," one guy joked on the video.

"I want you to rot in hell," another guy said.

The man in the scooter angrily flipped them off and powered down the sidewalk as the young men kept taunting him: "Skinner scooter! You don't have a cock!" They were still filming when a car suddenly pulled out and struck the guy's scooter. "Aw shit!" one guy yelled, as his camera slipped. "Not our fault," someone else muttered.

The man wasn't injured. But other unsettling details came to light a few days later: In addition to his physical limitations resulting from cerebral palsy, the man suffered from a "significant developmental disability," according to a local news outlet, which an advocate for the family said hindered his judgment. It was just the latest high-profile mishap for the movement: In October, a man said that he was falsely accused after the Surrey Creep Catchers posted a photo of him next to a video of a different man; the post set off a flurry of violent threats against the wrongly accused man, his boss, and his family. Another man crashed his car into a parked truck after a Surrey Creep Catcher stuck a camera in his face. (The group did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Then there was what happened with Katelynn McKnight. McKnight, a twenty-seven-year-old trans woman, struggled with her mental health, friends and family told Canada's Global News; last spring, she said she was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. When the head of Edmonton Creep Catchers came calling a few days later, she wore a red sweatshirt with a cheery message on the front: "You Gotta Have Heart!." Her hair was tucked behind her ears to show off her earrings.

The creep catcher called himself John Doep, but that wasn't his real name; he hid his eyes, too, behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses. Last April, he filmed the whole walk to McKnight's house, prolonging the suspense as long as possible. The moment she appeared on the porch, Doep launched into an ambush interview. "You here to meet a fourteen-year-old little girl?" he said accusingly. "You told me to come over, and you wanted to have shower sex with me, is this not true?"

Each hunter gets to decide which creeps to string along. And it's not always clear whose lives are worth upending.

McKnight tried to stay calm at first: She denied ever talking to him online, saying her phone was stolen days before by a friend. But Doep kept prodding her, refusing to let up until she began to break down. "I can't believe you would accuse me of this," she sobbed. How could she ever dream of doing such a thing, she asked, when she was sexually exploited as a child herself?

Doep didn't flinch. "Go on," he responded. "Please do."

After Doep posted the video online in April, it just kept spreading. "This is sinister AF [as fuck] someone lock it up," one commenter wrote on Facebook. In June, it made it to WorldStarHipHop, one of the Internet's biggest hubs for dark, viral videos; in August, it resurfaced again in a "top 10" compilation of creep catcher videos. McKnight was never charged with a crime, but she feared her online harassers would materialize outside her house, just as Doep had. "I can't leave my house I've lost so many friends my reputation is shattered," she wrote, according to her friend RL Dakin. "I want to figure out a way that protects innocent peoples rights to shut these fuckers down." In early September, McKnight took her own life.

Kamil Bialous

Doep claims that he posted the video for McKnight's own sake. "We felt the exposure of their need for help would force someone to intervene into their lives," he wrote me. But the Creep Hunters argue that cases like McKnight's show why their approach is superior: They'd never go after anyone so obviously vulnerable. "If we show up there, and the person is handicapped in any way, or if they look like they have a severe mental illness, we'll still talk to them, but we're not going to exploit someone," Brady said. But how do you tell who is really vulnerable, who is mentally ill, who is developmentally disabled, and who is having a momentary meltdown because they're accused of a heinous crime? After all, as Brady himself told me, it's not unusual for the guys to make threats on the spot. "It's usually one of the reactions we get—they'll threaten to hurt themselves," he said. "They sort of panic and they don't know what to do."

The group's members acknowledge the risks, but they insist that the potential for harm cannot begin to compare to the horrors that they're holding at bay—the trail of victims, real and imagined, that they attach to each of their catches. "How many girls has he met up with before? How many lives have you destroyed, and just because you got caught this time, you're threatening your own?" Brady said. Not to act—not to heed the call—would ultimately mean far more suffering, in his eyes, than any creep's fleeting anguish.

Creep hunting, in other words, is an act of extreme empathy—a just war to protect the most innocent of innocents, and one that is worth the potential casualties. The children they believe they're saving aren't cold abstractions. Kyle Welsby, the leader of Creep Hunters Ontario, was never a victim of sexual abuse himself. But after hours of chatting, he started to feel like his decoy was more than a fiction. "I had this one breakdown; I was at a friend's house and started flipping out. It wasn't the character that was being lured," he told me. "It was me."

Last fall, Kat began messaging with a man in his early thirties who loved to talk about superhero movies and his incest fantasies. "For example, I'm your dad and you come onto me," he wrote, according to her screenshots of her emails. He casually mentioned that he was on parole, the screenshots show. Shortly before they were supposed to meet, the Creep Hunters dug up his record: A few years earlier, he had been convicted of child luring and possessing child porn.

Kat wanted to confront the guy herself, so she hopped in the car. It was freezing out, but she sat outside the Starbucks, where the guy had told her to get a hot chocolate. When he arrived on the scene, she and Brady pounced. The guy tried to act nonchalant at first, insisting he knew it was a setup, Kat and Brady said. But he began to panic the moment Brady mentioned his criminal record. The guy abruptly stood up. "It looks like it's time for Plan B," he said, according to the Creep Hunters, rushing for the exit: He was going to kill himself.

Startled by the threat, the Creep Hunters followed him as he sped down the darkened sidewalk, continuing all the way up to the doors of his apartment building, which he closed in their faces. Then he messaged Kat one final time. "Im no creep, i would never harm a child like that…However if you are not a stone cold bitch…Could you make sure my cat gets to my sisters house," he wrote, according to screenshots of Kat's emails. "Plan b is an overdose of three products. Ive taken it. Too late now…I hope :)"

In the end, no one died. The Creep Hunters called the police, who rushed to the scene. The meeting didn't bring any new charges of child exploitation against the man, but he was later charged with violating the conditions of his probation. (The local police declined to comment.) Brady still considers the catch a bona fide success.

Kamil Bialous

When he took over the Creep Hunters last fall, Brady boasts, he created a culture of professionalism for their work: All chats and videos were required to be posted to the "head office" (a virtual workspace) and vetted by a "legal team" (a law student) before being published online. The group required members to sign a service agreement and complete a training program, using a manual called The Book of New Blood. The group even appointed an "office manager," a 55-year-old former HR assistant who organized all the chat logs—the smutty propositions, the overwrought confessions of love, the dick pics—to send to the police.

So far, Creep Hunters hasn't gotten anyone convicted, and only one catch—snaring a deputy sheriff in British Columbia—has resulted in charges of child sexual exploitation. But Brady insists that Creep Hunters could be the ideal complement to traditional law enforcement. Compared to the U.S., Canada has been slow to toughen its laws on child sexual exploitation: In 2008, it raised the age of consent from fourteen to sixteen years—the first time it had changed since 1892. Brady believes that the country needs to take America's lead in cracking down on sex offenders, and that groups like his can help close the gap. Since predator catchers don't have the ability to make arrests, they aren't subject to the same entrapment laws that limit how police carry out their own sting operations; they can go where the police don't, then turn their evidence over to the authorities.

He speculates that Creep Hunters could become the equivalent of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, even arguing that the group deserves government funding. (Creep Hunters doesn't currently accept any money for its work, he says, only accepting donations of cell phones and other equipment.) Mike Graham, who co-founded the group with Fritsen, told me their work is a form of community service. "It's like going to the soup kitchen or something, and helping homeless people," he said.

The group's members insist that the potential for harm cannot begin to compare to the horrors that they're holding at bay.

Actual law enforcement officials, however, are begging them to stop the confrontations. "They don't have anybody they're accountable to," said Sergeant Judy Bird of the Abbotsford Police Department in British Columbia. "They don't follow rules of evidence through our court, and it becomes very difficult for us to proceed with charges."

Law enforcement is required to follow strict guidelines when it comes to undercover operations or stings, to prevent entrapment and keep things from going off the rails. They have the ability to do background checks on suspects, for instance, while freelance crime-fighters are usually flying blind when they're confronting someone. "There's no way you can clean up vigilante justice enough to make it a valuable contribution," said Benjamin Perrin, an expert on child sexual exploitation and a law professor at the University of British Columbia. "These guys are amateurs, and they don't have a clue what they're doing." In Lacombe, Alberta, police charged a local creep catcher with harassment and mischief after he allegedly made threatening comments during a catch. "They really are, many times, on fishing trips trying to find cases or justify their actions," the acting police chief told the Lacombe Globe.

Creep Hunter Mike Graham Kamil Bialous

Chris Hansen, by contrast, had full cooperation from local police and prosecutors in the U.S. for To Catch a Predator, even installing NBC's equipment inside police headquarters. "You need to operate at a level of professional responsibility," Hansen told me. "There's a real danger there of doing this without the safeguards." Even with law enforcement on hand, things can go terribly awry. In 2006, a SWAT team raided the home of Bill Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Texas who was allegedly sending sexual messages to a 13-year-old decoy conducting the sting for an episode of To Catch a Predator. When law enforcement confronted Conradt inside his home, he shot and killed himself. Hansen and his TV crew were waiting outside; the episode aired a few months later. (Hansen recently revived his schtick in a segment called "Hansen vs. Predator" on the syndicated show Crime Watch Daily.)

While reports of online child luring in Canada have been on the rise , most perpetrators of child sexual abuse aren't strangers who prey on children over the Internet; they're relatives, coaches, family friends, and other adults who already know their victims, and who use the trust to abuse them, as the Creep Hunters' own stories reflect. And on occasion, Canada's predator hunters have interfered directly with police work: In Alberta, investigators were prepared to arrest a man when he was caught in a creep catcher sting, prompting him to flee to Winnipeg, according to a CTV report ; the man is now facing charges of molesting a baby and a toddler.

Creep Hunters members were determined to show me what conscientious, law-abiding vigilantes look like in action one rainy Saturday in November, hunching over their phones all afternoon to set up a meeting. But the life of a predator hunter is rarely predictable: That morning, group founder Tyler Fritsen woke up to a new round of accusations that he was a creep himself.

The story first surfaced when Fritsen was working with Creep Catcher, the biggest and best-known faction of the movement. A decade ago, when Fritsen was twenty-one, he told me, he was seeing a girl who lied about her age: He thought she was sixteen, but she was only fourteen. (At the time, the age of consent in Canada was fourteen.) "As soon I found out that she was younger, I ended it. I didn't talk to her no more," he said. Fritsen insisted it was an honest mistake, but he said the other members voted him out anyway, which is why he founded his own group in the first place. That hasn't stopped Fritsen's story from being recycled repeatedly. In late November, shortly before I met the Creep Hunters for the first time, the story started making the rounds on Facebook once again.

Fritsen, a sunny guy with a puffy head of curls, insisted in Vancouver that his heroics would prove the haters wrong. "Kill me, I'll go down in history for saving kids," he told me. But in mid-December, the main Creep Hunters Canada page on Facebook got hacked, the main title replaced with the phrase "PedoLover"; members suspected it was a rival feuding with their group. Fritsen decided that he'd had enough of waking up to messages calling him a disgusting hypocrite pedophile, and he worried that his affiliation would hurt their cause. In early January, Fritsen announced that he was leaving Creep Hunters for good. "This guy screwed up once and they totally made him look like the worst person in the world," his cofounder Mike Graham lamented.

Kamil Bialous

The night before I leave Vancouver, a big catch finally comes through.

It's still pouring rain when Brady drives out to meet G-Man at McDonald's, so they prepare inside Brady's car. First things first: deciding whether to call the cops or not. Earlier that day, McDonald's Man had sent Kat a message: He was stuck at a wedding and needed to reschedule. When she balked, accusing him of never wanting to meet, he started to panic. "I love u a lot and don't want to lose u Please reply," McDonald's Man wrote, then threatened to mutilate himself, according to email records from Kat. "I wil b mad if u hurt urself," she wrote back.

No doubt, that was weird, the men agreed. But there was a complicating factor: Right before he agreed to meet, according to the screenshot of an email Kat showed me, McDonald's Man wrote: "I'm scared that the police will come Ads on Craigslist n on news creep catchers catch u."

G-Man doesn't think it's worth the risk of spooking him with a police presence. "That's what he's scared of—he's worried about the cops," he tells Brady. "They're going to intervene right with us, right away, they won't let us do our thing." They decide to hold off on contacting the police beforehand. Brady will bring his extra phone with him in case they need to make the call while they're recording the catch. G-Man doesn't know what to make of the threat, anyway. "I'm not 100 percent sure if he's suicidal or not, just because he said he was going to cut his dick off," he says.

A few minutes before 8 p.m., they get out of the car and walk into the restaurant.

Kamil Bialous

McDonald's Man doesn't move. He can't move. His eyes start to well up. "I don't want any type of trouble, I don't want to do anything bad to anybody," he tells Brady and G-Man, his voice a high quaver. It's a simple story, he explains: He married a woman overseas; they even had a kid together. But the moment she got to Canada, she took off. It had all just been for the visa.

"I feel lonely because she's not there, my son is not there…" his words come out languid and hazy, like he's talking in his sleep. "In my heart, I went on there because I wanted to find somebody so that I could be together ..."

Kamil Bialous

Brady is starting to feel sick. "You're talking about meeting up with a child—with a little, little vulnerable girl," he says, gripping his phone as it continues to record. "She would need years and years of therapy to deal with you."

As customers shuffle by with trays of food, the Creep Hunters start to draw an audience. An old man in a knit cap sits down at a nearby table, unwrapping his hamburger as he watches Brady tell McDonald's Man how much he disgusts him. "It doesn't matter if your wife left you, if you lost your job—I don't give a shit about any of those things," Brady says.

The old man polishes off his burger as he watches McDonald's Man crumple, tears starting to stream down his face. The Creep Hunters then start haranguing him about his threat to cut himself; they insist he needs a medical examination before they'll let him go. "We're either going to have an ambulance show up, and we're going to get you checked out, because I don't trust that you're not going to hurt yourself, or we're going to go down to the hospital together and I'll drive you there myself," says Brady. The old man watching the scene takes out his phone to snap a picture. Then Brady tells him to call 911.

McDonald's Man clasps his hands together in prayer. "I don't want to get in trouble, I don't want to get in trouble with the law," he keeps saying, as if the mantra will somehow put the last month into reverse. The tears keep coming.

"It's too late, man," Brady says. He's heard it before—the pleas, the chest-pounding despair. Once a man even curled up on the ground into fetal position.

But there was something different about this guy, Brady will admit later: He has never seen a target ask to call his parents before. "Please come right away if you love me!" McDonald's Man cries into the phone.

Kamil Bialous

Within minutes, two police officers show up. Like the teacher's pet, the Creep Hunters have everything cued up to show them: The video they just taped, every message he's sent to Kat. In the middle of show-and-tell, the man's family starts trickling into the restaurant, standing awkwardly in the corner. "Can my dad please come by my side, so I can have somebody who is there?" McDonald's Man pleads with the officer, who tells him firmly to stay put.

Finally, it's time. Come with us, the officers tell him, gesturing for him to take his coat. They're not going to do this in front of everyone.

The moment they walk out of the McDonald's, the cops start putting him under arrest. He suddenly turns and tries to wrench the door open, desperate to get back inside—back to his family, back to the moment before he learned the truth about Kat. He heaves the door open an inch before the officers yank him back and cuff him. As they're putting McDonald's Man into the squad car, a young man rushes up, telling them he's a relative. "Is he going to need a lawyer?" he asks.

"He will," the officer tells him.

Brady and G-Man drive away, invigorated by their success.

"These guys are amateurs, and they don't have a clue what they're doing."

Charges haven't been filed since the man was arrested in November, but local police tell me it's still an open investigation. When I call the number that McDonald's Man reportedly gave Kat, the man who answers the phone hangs up the moment I mention the Creep Hunters.

In the days after the catch, I can't stop thinking about everything that led up to it: Craigslist, a site that's long fallen out of fashion for most internet hookups; hundreds of emails with an endlessly patient decoy; a meeting arranged on a night a reporter was in town. I ask Kat how much of a threat she thinks McDonald's Man ultimately posed—in person, he seemed even more guileless than in the fawning messages that she showed me. "The opportunity arose, and he took it," she says. "I don't think he'd go out looking for it. But it fell in his lap."

Four months later, Creep Hunters still haven't posted the video.

Since my trip to Vancouver, the group has backed away from their hallmark confrontational videos, growing wary of the potential consequences as their rivals have faced criminal charges and defamation suits . They've taken down their old website with the filmed catches and smutty chat logs, replacing it with a bland, corporate-style template and a sanitized mission statement: "We at Creep Hunters Canada are not vigilantes, we do not take the law into our own hands."

Brady recently told me they've stopped the face-to-face confrontations altogether: They'll set up the stings, then ask the cops to meet the guys instead, posting videos of the arrests, photos of the suspects, and detailed allegations. He claims that's what he wanted out of Creep Hunters all along: court justice, not street justice. But Brady also admits that going to the cops is a good PR move: "It's better for—I hate to use the word—our brand."

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