Valley teens keep organizing ‘To Catch a Predator’ stings for TikTok

Scottsdale resident Larry Billman was lying in bed one night in July when his phone started ringing. One call was followed by another and then another, all from a number Billman thought belonged to a young woman who’d randomly contacted him six months earlier. She was in town, she wanted Billman to know. And she wanted to meet.

Calls from this number weren't a new phenomenon for the 75-year-old Billman. This mystery woman had bombarded him with dozens of calls over the last few months. Now she was calling again, over and over. He didn’t want to meet, he told her. But the calls continued. Finally, he decided to put an end to it.

“OK,” Billman recalled thinking, “I’m gonna see what this is all about.”

What it was about, he could never have predicted.

He agreed to meet at a North Scottsdale Walmart parking lot. When he pulled into the parking lot, he learned that his harasser was not a young woman but a 13-year-old boy seeking internet fame. The teen — who is named in a Scottsdale police report about the incident but whose identity Phoenix New Times is not revealing because he is a minor — was hopping on a trend by young TikTok users to emulate the show “To Catch a Predator." In the Valley, as elsewhere, foolhardy kids are setting up their own stings of people they believe could be child sex abusers.

Inspired by the eponymous Chris Hansen-hosted TV show, the social media phenomenon has been an off-and-on internet trend for years. Teenagers set out with iPhones and a group of their rowdy friends to confront alleged “predators." Only no professional camera crews are lying in wait. TikTok accounts dedicated to the trend, such as @Unfortunate.encounters and @Predcaught, have thousands of followers and can generate as many as 15 million views on a single video.

The encounters are high on danger and light on bulletproof investigative technique. Police have had to respond to multiple “To Catch a Predator” encounters in Phoenix and Scottsdale over the past year, police departments from both cities confirmed. Recently, five people in Massachusetts were arrested and charged with kidnapping and conspiracy after a group of some two dozen college students chased and brutally assaulted a man they'd lured via Tinder to “meet” an 18-year-old girl. Some of the students punched the man in the back of the head and slammed him in his car door as he tried to flee.

Police became involved in Billman’s “sting” too. After he recognized the set-up and peeled out of the parking lot, Scottsdale police pulled him over for speeding. In their subsequent investigation, police determined there was no evidence he’d responded to the catfishing kid in a sexual manner. According to the police incident report, the kid pretended to be a woman because he thought it’d be funny.

“This thing has just devastated me,” Billman said. “These were a bunch of vigilantes trying to entrap somebody to make a name for themselves.”

‘Nothing sexual’

Billman picked up the first time, he said, because he always answers the phone.

According to the police report, the boy had randomly called Billman’s number six months before their run-in in the Walmart parking lot. Billman installs DUI interlock systems for a living, and often answers random numbers in case they belong to potential customers. When he took the teenager’s call, he asked the caller if they were a girl. For laughs, the teen told later told police, he said he was.

(New Times reached out to the boy’s parents by phone and through Facebook but did not hear back.)

For months after, the teen boy contacted Billman pretending to be a girl, whom Billman believed to be in her late teens to early 20s, according to the police report. The boy told police that Billman made sexual remarks in their correspondence. Billman told New Times he didn’t remember if he made sexual remarks toward the caller, but said he “didn't make the conversation” and “just followed along,” though the “girl” on the other end “alluded to a lot of things.”

In his report, Scottsdale police officer Nicholas Zermeno noted “there was nothing sexual in the chats between the two.” Officer Nicholas Skalicky added that messages included “just normal selfie pictures with no nudity.”

The night of their encounter, Billman drove his black truck into the Walmart parking lot, talking to the “girl” on the phone as he did. As he circled the lot, Billman spotted the Toyota SUV he was meeting. A young man stood next to the car talking on the phone. Looking closer, Billman realized the young man was talking to him.

“You’re not even a girl,” Billman recalled telling the boy over the phone. “I don’t know what you guys are up to but I’m out of here.”

Scared that “they were trying to rob me and beat me up,” Billman turned his truck around. As he left, he said, around 10 young boys jumped out from behind a trailer in the lot and started running toward him. One threw a rock, breaking his back window. Two Toyota SUVs gave chase, flashing their high beams at him. Scottsdale police intercepted Billman a few miles away.

Police made no arrests resulting from the confrontation. Billman was cited for speeding, which he denies doing. His encounter, plus several others police had been forced to respond to, led a Scottsdale police spokesperson to put out a mass email not long after.

Its message: Kids, please cut this shit out.

Multiple cases in the Valley

Over the past year, police in Scottsdale and Phoenix have responded to a combined six “To Catch a Predator” trend encounters. Phoenix has had four, and the department said it has filed charges for luring a minor for sexual exploitation in three of them. New Times has requested but not yet received documents related to those cases from Phoenix police and from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

Scottsdale has dealt with two such incidents. In August the department issued a warning. In a mass email, Scottsdale police spokesperson Allison Sempsis urged community members to do what might seem obvious: Don’t “initiate their own ‘to catch a predator’ investigations online or arrange meet-ups with the alleged predator.”

In an interview with New Times, Sempsis said she’s heard from residents who justify the stings by saying “somebody needs to do it.” She wants them to know that Scottsdale police are taking action. The agency has a unit focused on child sex trafficking and similar operations. If teenagers find themselves communicating with a potential predator, Sempis said they should call the police.

TikTok-driven vigilante justice is not only dangerous, she said, but it could make a legitimate case more difficult to prosecute.

“That way we can do our investigation and develop a probable cause through investigation techniques to make that arrest and bring this person to justice,” Sempsis said. “You never know what’s going to happen. You never know who’s showing up.”

The boy who lured Billman still has active social media accounts, including a TikTok account with thousands of views. Billman said he’s seen the videos of his confrontation, which were sent to him by friends. Those videos no longer appear on the teen’s social media accounts.

If they’ve been deleted, that might be a sign that the authorities' message got through. Then again, when police spoke with the teen who lured Billman, he “did not seem to grasp the severity of the situation he caused,” Officer Deven Fellows wrote in the police report. “During my conversation with him, it was clear that this incident started as part of a ‘TikTok’ inspired idea, that he wanted to recreate for social media attention.”