Paedophile hunter who posed as girl traps 16 men

A VIGILANTE snared 16 paedophiles by posing online as a 14-year-old schoolgirl, a court heard.

Griff Roberts set up a fake profile on the Badoo website calling himself ‘ Little Laura’ and was quickly chatted up by men.

Engaging them in lurid conversations, he arranged to meet the men in a park. But when they turned up for a ‘date’ Roberts confronted them with a camcorder and quizzed them before handing the evidence to police.

Sheffield Crown Court heard that 16 men from Manchester, Middlesbrough, Leeds and Bradford had been charged following the ploy. Some 70 others are thought to be under investigation.

Married health and safety manager Stephen Crookes, 65, from Doncaster was one of the men snared. The court heard he contacted ‘Little Laura’ in May 2014 and was told she was just 14.

In sexually explicit online chats, he asked her to strip for him and said they could make ‘passionate love’ in his car. When they later met at a park in Halifax, Yorkshire, Crookes was confronted by Roberts – who bombarded him with questions for 20 minutes.

But the pervert claimed he wanted to warn the girl about meeting people she had chatted to online and had ‘no intention’ of having sex with her. Crookes admitted grooming a child but was spared jail. Instead, a judge handed out a community order with supervision and put him on a sex offenders’ programme.