The Deadly Subculture of Internet Video Vigilantes (repost)

These influencers are angry, weird, and they have a body count

The following story — originally published in January 2023 — deals with the subculture of internet “predator catchers” or “creep catchers," people who take it upon themselves to confront alleged sexual predators. In a follow-up, I will go into some of the reasons this has become so popular (spoiler: late-stage capitalism) but for now I’ll content myself with discussing one particular vigilante and the destruction he’s left in his wake.

• “Predator catchers” are social media influencers who livestream their amateur child predator sting operations

• Few of these sting operations lead to arrest, and fewer still lead to conviction

• The alleged predators are often harassed and sometimes commit suicide

• Cody Mattingly, a predator catcher from San Diego County, is being sued for harassment by two of his targets

• Another one of his targets, attorney Craig Gertz, killed himself during a sting operation

• Mattingly primarily uses Grindr, an LGBTQ dating app, to set up his stings

Encinitas is a coastal city in San Diego County, ninety-five miles south of Los Angeles. The San Diego Tourism Authority calls it “one of the best surf towns in the world.” While I have no opinion on that, I can say that to an outsider, it has all the hallmarks of what a rust belt kid like me would recognize as being appropriately — cinematically, even — SoCal: boathouses, beaches, the mild, Mediterranean climate, a downtown worthy of a 1980s teen movie. Encinitas was the home of Craig Gertz, a transplant from the Midwest looking to meet someone on the gay dating app Grindr about this time last year when he was catfished by a self-styled “predator catcher” named Cody Mattingly. The incident led to a confrontation, which in turn led to Gertz’s suicide later that same night. He was 56 years old.

I first learned of the death of Craig Gertz earlier this year, when an activist in San Diego told me about a YouTube livestream he had witnessed in 2021. In the video, he said, Mattingly chased Gertz down the street to the latter’s house and waited outside until Gertz killed himself inside the residence. The activist, whose identity I am withholding, said the gunshot could be heard on the livestream. The video was then removed from YouTube.

Suicide is a real possibility anytime you publicly shame (or merely threaten to publicly shame) an alleged predator. In 2006, Louis Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Rockwell County, Texas, killed himself during the filming of NBC’s “To Catch A Predator” series. In 2010, Germany’s version of the show, Tatort Internet, featured a 61-year-old man who subsequently disappeared (authorities believe he killed himself). There have been other predator catcher suicides in England, Northern Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Florida, and Connecticut. In St. Louis, Missouri, in 2018, a suicidal man turned up at a sting because he planned on killing himself and wanted someone to be there when he did it. In 2020, in Sandusky, Ohio, two men who were exposed in stings committed suicide, while a third man’s death is suspected to be suicide. These tragedies highlight the potential for serious consequences and harm that can result from the actions of predator-catcher vigilantes.

Predator catchers are members of an online community who pretend to be minors looking for sex online. Once they’ve made contact with a potential (suspected) predator, they arrange a meeting, videotape the encounter, and then post the video online to shame them publicly. And sometimes, when their target won’t meet with them, they track the guy down and videotape the encounter anyway. These vigilantes are content creators, raised on viral videos and YouTube livestreams, who think that they know more about stopping sexual assault than law enforcement, public health professionals, and the courts. And of course, there is a financial incentive for making these videos. One high-profile video vigilante, also operating in San Diego County, is known only as “Ghost.” His YouTube channel, CC Unit (“CC” is short for “Creep Catchers”), has chalked up over 20 million views since early 2020, with many of his videos registering over 300,000 views each. He receives donations through PayPal. And he’s not alone — everyone in this field juggles multiple revenue streams.

“It’s dangerous in so many ways,” Adam Scott Wandt, assistant professor of public policy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told a reporter earlier this year. One issue is that the evidence obtained in these sting operations rarely stands up in court. Another is that many of the targets have serious issues that allow them to be enticed into meeting with vigilantes. When you watch predator catcher videos on YouTube, it’s obvious that a vast percentage of the individuals are either mentally ill or on drugs.

After multiple run-ins with Mattingly, Ghost, and other predator catchers, the San Diego Police Department has issued a training bulletin titled “Response to Cyber-Vigilantes.” According to the document, “ICAC [Internet Crimes Against Children] will typically not work with civilians acting as undercover operatives and does not condone such activities.” Not only do predator catchers endanger themselves and the general public, but the evidence they gather won’t hold up in court.

Mattingly, who calls his “organization” People v. Preds (he’s the only member) has attracted some media attention for his sting operations. In October 2021, an executive at Nvidia named Todd Wiseman lost his job when he was filmed meeting Mattingly. Two months later, the same thing happened to George Cacioppo, a vice president at Sony. One of Mattingly’s most recent sting operations swept up Russell Rappel-Schmid, the Chief Data Officer for the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC).

Mattingly’s targets run the gamut; cops and ex-cops, teachers, a manager at a Subway, a guy who works the front desk at a hotel. Some of these guys are visibly disturbed, but a significant portion of them seem to be guilty of nothing more than being catfished.

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Most of Mattingly’s sting operations begin on the gay dating app, Grindr.

When you open Grindr, you are presented with a grid of pictures, representing online users of the app. Each has a display name and a distance noted. These begin with the person closest to you — depending on your location, they might only be a few hundred feet away. For instance, as I write this, the profile pic of the user closest to me (1,151 feet) sports a headless, flabby body, naked except for a pair of briefs, taken from a camera aimed squarely at the guy’s crotch. Otherwise, aside from a username (“Looking Discree”) and an age (63), the profile is blank. The first time I logged into Grindr, as soon as I created an account, I got a message from a profile without a picture named Looking4DoMtop. The total message: “Hi senddick.” The Grindr profile includes spaces for your HIV status, most recent testing date, and a place to list your vaccinations. But this info is optional, and mostly left blank.

Grindr is a completely anonymous space. Accounts are free to create, and the same person can create multiple accounts, even after their account is revoked for harassing or otherwise endangering users. And there is no real way to keep minors off the platform. Sometimes, the consequences of this are undeniably terrible:

• In Lawrence, Massachusetts, a 53-year-old police officer and former Marine named Carlos Vieira was convicted of two counts of aggravated rape of a child and a count of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 after meeting an eighth-grader from Grindr in a public park. He subsequently received a sentence of 10 to 12 years in prison. “There was no mistaking that the victim was a boy,” said Assistant DA Kate MacDougall. “And, as a police officer, his actions further eroded the public’s trust in law enforcement.”

• Sean Travis Crumpler of Aurora, Colorado was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to human trafficking of a minor for the purpose of sexual servitude in Colorado. According to one witness at Crumpler’s trial, as many as 175 boys may have been victimized over two years, with a dozen boys often staying at his Aurora home at any given time. He used Grindr to lure runaways to “have sex with Crumpler whenever he wanted,” according to the CBS News affiliate in Denver, in exchange for “a place to live, clothes, alcohol, drugs and cell phones. Some of the boys had been tattooed with Crumpler’s name on their bodies.” He was 50 years old at the time of his sentencing.

• In McKinney, Texas, an HIV-positive music teacher named Roger Kessler, age 43, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexual assault of a child. He had met the 15-year-old on Grindr. He was arrested “after the teen’s mom saw Kessler leaving her family’s backyard. She thought he was a burglar, followed him to a nearby intersection and ‘detained him on the ground’ until police arrived,” according to a report in the Dallas Morning News.

In a written statement, Grindr explained that it “takes the safety and security of our users with the utmost seriousness,” although the steps it has taken to keep its kids safe — asking users to verify their age before opening an account, placing the app in the 17+ category in both the Apple and Google Play stores, and AI content moderation — are clearly not enough.

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On September 23, 2021, at 7:40 p.m., an officer of the San Diego County Sheriff was dispatched to the corner of 2nd and J Streets in Encinitas. A resident had called 911 to report that a white male, roughly 40 years old (later identified as Cody Mattingly), was screaming at another white male in his fifties (later identified as Craig Gertz), accusing him of arranging to meet a 14-year-old for sex. A short while later, the witness called 911 again to report that Mattingly was now chasing Gertz down the street, yelling something along the lines of: Oh, so now you’re going to kill yourself? 

As Mattingly followed Gertz to his home, he called 911 to report that he was in pursuit. The 911 operator, for their part, sounded annoyed. At 8:06 p.m., Mattingly called back from outside Gertz’s house to report “a loud bang” inside. “I’m not sure if you guys are worried about this guy’s safety or not … but as I was standing here, there was a loud bang.” The recording ends abruptly.

Mattingly called back one more time. He sounded belligerent: “As I was standing outside of his house a few minutes ago, I heard a loud bang,” he said. “It was 15 minutes ago, so if you don’t have a call generated … then I’m just gonna go home.”

The next day, when Craig Gertz didn’t show up at work, the police conducted a welfare check. They found him dead of a single gunshot wound to the head from his registered 9mm Luger pistol.

Mattingly deleted the video, but not before the incident was reported on Predator News Now, a popular podcast in the vigilante predator catcher community. “Playing it back in my mind,” said one of the hosts of the program, “he [Mattingly] did every single thing right.”

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The anonymous nature of Grindr makes it easy for real minors to put themselves in harm’s way. It’s also an ideal place for people posing as minors to catfish gay men — strike up a conversation, find out their personal information, dox them, and harass them either via phone or in person.

Last year, three complaints were filed in Los Angeles County accusing Cody Mattingly of harassment. They’re all being handled by Salar Atrizadeh, an attorney based in Beverly Hills. The first was filed on behalf of Kapish Haldia. At the time, according to his webpage, Haldia was a 28-year-old vice president at Highview Capital, a $500 million private equity firm based in Los Angeles.

On February 26th at about 4:30 a.m., Haldia sent a message to the profile of a man named “Trey” (actually, Cody Mattingly).

“Trey” replied:

Are you a bottom

Can you send me pix

Throughout the ensuing conversation, Mattingly was aggressive:

But like I said I’m down to do whatever

I think I want to top

I’m 15 and curious haha

These chats come from screencaptures provided by Cody Mattingly. Haldia contends that the messages are false or incomplete, that he’d never knowingly continue an explicit conversation with a minor.

Regardless of what was actually said, Haldia eventually replied with his home address and some sexually explicit photos. They messaged back and forth for almost an hour before Mattingly said he would take an Uber to meet Haldia. At one point, Haldia tried to back out, but Mattingly lied: “I already called the Uber u want me 2 cabcel it...” (sic).

This brief snippet of conversation, appended to the end of Mattingly’s video, doesn’t actually prove much of anything: It could be out of context or completely fabricated. We’ll never know.

At about 5:19 a.m., Mattingly arrived at Haldia’s home, filming from his body-worn camera. Haldia, on the street in front of his apartment building, seems to be taken off-guard. After about three minutes, Haldia returns to his building as Mattingly yells after him: “Kapish likes little kids! Kapish thought it would be a good idea to invite a kid over to his house today! Kapish likes children! You scumbag piece of shit, fuck you!”

On March 6, Mattingly posted a picture of Haldia to his Instagram account (since suspended) and a video of the encounter to YouTube (also suspended). According to a complaint filed by Haldia, this led to multiple voicemails from Mattingly, “screaming and threatening to call his employer.” On Instagram, the complaint alleges, Mattingly encouraged his followers to contact Haldia’s employer, family, and friends to disseminate the false statements. His parents and employers have received harassment through phone calls, text messages, and social media.

Haldia was also doxxed by a website called NetPredators, which posted his photo, private phone number, email, address, and other personal information. The person who runs NetPredators knows how serious doxxing can be; they explained their own security concerns to me when I contacted them for this story:

I don’t do phone calls. I don’t communicate in any way that could be identifiable to me. Far too many sick people that want to hurt those that are behind the site... Even when i (sic) do verbally communicate with people in this community that I do not know, I use voice changing (sic) software… I have a family and I spare no precautions.

Haldia’s complaint was filed on March 1 of this year. At the end of June, Mattingly’s attorney Gordon Sattro filed an anti-SLAPP motion to have the charges dismissed. An anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) motion is used to quash lawsuits that threaten free speech. They are designed to allow people who have been sued to quickly and easily have the lawsuit dismissed, so they can continue to speak out and participate in public discourse without fear of reprisal.

The justification for the anti-SLAPP motion is that Mattingly’s videos are a public service; the cyber-vigilante should be placed in the same category as Daniel Ellsberg or Woodward and Bernstein. Mattingly would like us to believe that doxxing private citizens and harassing them at work and at home, and harassing their families, is protected under the First Amendment.

After Haldia, two more people filed complaints against Mattingly. George Cacioppo was a senior vice president at Sony Interactive Entertainment in December 2021 when he was contacted by Mattingly on Grindr. The video of this “catch” doesn’t show much. It’s just over two-and-a-half minutes long, with over a minute devoted to an opening credit sequence. When Cacioppo (who Mattingly refers to as Jeff) appears on screen in his Sony PS5 t-shirt and shorts, Mattingly angrily confronts him: “I can call the cops, or we can have a conversation.” This is one of Mattingly’s favorite tactics. He gives his target a choice: help me create content by appearing in my video, or I will call the police. This time, Cacioppo doesn’t take the bait and returns to his house. Mattingly becomes irate: “I got your face on video, you scumbag! You want me to call the cops?” He then starts screaming about Cacioppo inviting “a 15-year-old over tonight to have sex.” The video then ends abruptly.

Mattingly didn’t respond to my request for the transcript of his chat with Cacioppo, so all I have to go by is the complaint filed in July 2022. Yes, Cacioppo spoke to Mattingly on Grindr that evening — he had spoken with several guys. He didn’t believe that Mattingly was a minor, and obviously (as there was no minor involved) he never spoke with or sent pics to a minor. When Mattingly showed up at his house, “it was patently obvious that [Mattingly] was not a minor.”

Regardless of what you and I might suspect happened between Mattingly and Cacioppo that night, the fact is that we don’t know, and we’ll never know. Mattingly isn’t a cop, doesn’t work with the cops, and didn’t conduct his catfishing expedition in a way that offers any real proof of anything.

It was only a matter of days before news of the incident leaked out. CNET, Kontaku, and Newsweek, among other outlets, reported that Cacioppo lost his job on December 8. The news media, not at all interested in the problematic nature of the predator catcher community, plays this as a straight news story. Mattingly’s “organization,” it is reported has caught Cacioppo red-handed. No one knows anything about People v. Preds — not who’s behind it, how many members it has, how it conducts its sting operations — but that doesn’t seem to set off any alarm bells in the media.

Cacioppo’s case was dismissed at his request in September. The following month, a California high school teacher and LGBTQ+ club moderator named Roger Kavigan was arrested on suspicion of exchanging lewd text messages with a minor. This was Mattingly’s 225th successful “catch.”

It’s unclear from the video that Mattingly posted on Rumble exactly what happened. For the first five minutes or so, the screen shows the People V Preds logo while audio of Mattingly — in character as “Johnny,” a homeschooled boy, talks to Kavigan. The conversation is awkward, stilted. Mattingly isn’t very convincing, and Kavigan is clearly in a hurry to get off the phone. From there, the video cuts to a camera recording from inside Mattingly’s pocket as he walks up to Kavigan’s home. When the camera emerges, he confronts the (soon-to-be former) teacher, inside his home. Kavigan, dressed in an ill-considered t-shirt featuring the logo of Iowa’s Kum & Go convenience store chain, pleads with Mattingly to leave his house while the predator catcher explains that his “little brother,” who Kavigan arranged to meet, is only 14 years old. (It’s not clear why Mattingly feels like he has to lie and invent a younger brother when filming these videos.)

At the end of the video, we catch a rare glimpse of Mattingly — in this case, his shadow on Kavigan’s front yard. It turns out that Mattingly wears a fedora, like Matt Drudge and the *tips fedora* meme guy.

After the video was posted on the internet, word got out that a California schoolteacher was caught trying to have sex with a child. Kavigan was placed on leave from his high school, and on Nov. 23 investigators with the Orange County Sheriff arrested him on suspicion of contacting a minor with intent to commit sexual assault.

Kavigan is suing Mattingly for harassment and trespassing.

Stephen Rotella, an investigator working on the Haldia case, sees the problem with Grindr as being much larger than the harassment of one person. “The gay community out here … are being targeted,” he says. “Ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of Mattingly’s cases are from Grindr. He creates profiles stating that he is 18 or 19 years old, then he contacts people. He turns it into a sexual event. And these people are anticipating an 18- or 19-year-old.”

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For the last two months, I’ve been working with a national news outlet to tell the story of Craig Gertz’s suicide. Nobody involved would agree to go on the record, so we had to drop it. Even the LGBTQ activist who brought this story to my attention has stopped returning my calls. It’s not hard to understand why — who would want to be associated with internet predators in any way?

Before I received the medical examiner’s report, the only evidence I had that Craig Gertz had died was a brief obituary in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin and a legal notice that Gertz’s wife would be handling his estate. Gertz was still married, but the couple had been separated for over three years. They had two older children.

Eventually, I was able to track down a man — let’s call him Martin — who was close to Gertz during the last few months of his life. Gertz was 56 when he died. Martin was 20. They met on Grindr. When we spoke, I asked Martin about the age difference. He said it was no big deal. “I felt like he always treated me as an equal, a peer. He always respected my ideas.”

Craig Gertz was “super sweet,” Martin says. “An all-American dude,” liked by everyone who met him. “He was just like a sweet, all-around guy.”

After their first date, Martin spent the night at Craig’s house, and they were in daily contact for the next few months. Last September, when the communication stopped abruptly, Martin knew something was terribly wrong. He did some internet sleuthing and saw a Facebook post by someone in Gertz’s family. “Sentimental, gushy stuff,” he says. “He’ll be missed, that kind of thing.” That’s when he realized his friend was dead.

I asked Martin about Gertz: How active was he on Grindr?

“Maybe he was making up for lost time” after having come out to his family later in life, Martin says. “But there isn’t anything wrong with that.”

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“I’m filming for my protection and yours,” the self-styled predator catcher invariably says when confronting an alleged predator. Of course, this is bullshit. The real purpose of the video is to create content for social media.

While watching these videos, it is natural to be disgusted by the men who arrive, apparently looking to meet up with minors. Watch enough of these videos and you will be struck by the realization that Cody Mattingly and his colleagues are very angry, very dysfunctional human beings. They deceive people — often mentally ill or high on drugs, often just profoundly alone — into situations where they would never normally find themselves.

This is a witch hunt. Then again, there are some witches, which makes the story rather inscrutable. And, some of the catchers are plain bizarre. One guy’s schtick is to interview the potential predator while feeding him Carolina Reapers (according to the Guinness World Records people, the Carolina Reaper is the hottest chili pepper in the world). Often, these predators are obviously slow or on drugs, making it hard to believe that they could make it out of the house without Mattingly’s pressuring them. Still, whenever you see a potential predator confronted in a Walmart or Best Buy (for some reason, the two box stores are popular locations for Canadian predator catchers) you can’t help but be angered at the thought of some creep like that approaching a child for sex.

“Is this how you want laws to be enforced?” asks Thaddeus Hoffmeister, an attorney and law professor who researches social media’s impact on the legal system. “People are already being tried and convicted on YouTube,” without due process, and without any victim to speak of.

In the meantime, Cody Mattingly has switched things up a bit. These days, instead of San Diego County (where police have been told not to work with Mattingly) or Los Angeles County (where he’s attracted lawsuits), People V Preds has found police departments in Orange County to be cooperative. The police are notified in advance, often arriving while Mattingly confronts the predator. The cyber-vigilante gets his footage, and the cops get their arrest. 

By New Year’s Eve 2022, Cody Mattingly has had 232 confirmed catches. And zero prosecutions.

UPDATE: Cody Logan Mattingly is currently on trial in Los Angeles County, where he is accused of threatening Kapish Haldia through voicemail and encouraging his social media followers to contact Haldia’s employer, family, and friends. According to the lawsuit, both his parents and employers were subsequently subjected to harassment via phone calls, text messages, and social media. Haldia was also doxxed by a website called NetPredators, which posted his photograph, phone number, email address, home address, and other personal information.

As a result of Mattingly’s actions, Haldia claims that he suffered emotional, physical, and financial damages, including the loss of his employment. The incident also impacted Haldia’s family and friends, who received harassing communications from unknown people. Haldia’s parents specifically received messages accusing their son of being a pedophile.

During a recess in the trial yesterday, I approached Mattingly and introduced myself.

MATTINGLY: You’re the Joe Flatley that wrote the article about Craig Gertz?

FAILED STATE UPDATE: Yes.

MATTINGLY: Kick rocks.

FAILED STATE UPDATE: Huh?

MATTINGLY: Kick rocks, Joe.

FAILED STATE UPDATE: Is that your quote?

MATTINGLY: Kick rocks.