Even Professionals often times make false accusations. (you know the people that make money for doing this work) Here is just a few news stories of accusations getting out of hand.
– https://www.unilad.co.uk/news/youtuber-makes-62-year-old-man-cry-after-internet-witch-hunt/
– https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-45395607
– https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/21/innocent-people-wrongly-accused-paedophiles-arrested-had-children/
– https://www.salon.com/2010/07/26/unjustly_accused_child_abusers/

Pedohunting isn’t a game, and you could very well be the cause of ruining a innocent person life, for every stupid pedophile is a smart, sophisticated, tech savvy pedophile. It’s not hard to pretend to be someone else online, they may use vpns, virtual machines, and have a scapegoat setup to be framed in case of someone who is investigating the criminal, it happens more often than you would believe.

So before you consider to “pedohunt” ask yourself if your time is well spent on a very low chance of getting the right proof to accuse an individual of a hefty crime. Remember there are many more important tasks that could be used with your time such as victim mitigation (finding a victim and contacting the authorities, their family or another organization), creating content to help educate others about these trending threats (anyone can do this) spreading awareness and knowledge on how to prevent becoming a victim yourself, to kids and adults alike (Share videos that helped you).

We will offer some basic advice on how to proceed if you still decide to “hunt” a pedo, we don’t believe in vigilantism, our advice is on gathering information and forwarding it to the proper authorities to let them finish an investigation into the individual.

Step Two: Evidence Gathering
– IP address are not silver bullets, they can be VPN Spoofed and only offer a regional area of the possible suspect location, however correlating this alongside additional information can help add weight to a report.
– Chat-logs, if you archive your logs then be sure to have the additional information for law enforcement to properly find the accounts under said chatroom’s and messages, I.E. Urls, Account ID numbers, etc…
– Direct Messages between two parties, for example, if you are trying to prove the suspect grooms by pretending to be a minor (Please don’t do this), then understand that anything you say which can be taken as enticement of the suspect, could be labeled as entrapment, thus not being useful to anyone. If you decide to take this method, then be mindful that you should never urge or lead your discussion in any way that can be viewed as misleading to the suspect.
– Saving all the suspects social media accounts being used is one of the more important tasks to conduct, archiving these accounts and their messages for review later on can help with securing a proper case to be filed.
*Keep in mind that as a investigator of any kind, you should not seek anything, but the truth.

Step Three: Filing and Reporting
– All the evidence you have gather should be neatly organized into a text file, here https://exposingexploitation.home.blog/report-guide/ are our guides and examples you can use as reference, but you can also look up other police report samples to help conduct your own. Keep in mind the cleaner and smaller the report you can make the better, the rule of thumb is, Keep it Simple.
– Our advice is to report both to the victims country and to the country that the suspect resides in, Here is a list of reporting agencies from around the world. https://exposingexploitation.home.blog/reporting/
– If possible, ask to have a reference number to your report, this way you can give further information if needed to the case file, if needed this should also hold accountability to the agency involved in the event nothing is even done about the case.