Luckless Predator Only Attracted to Undercover Cops

It’s official. There’s nobody in the chat rooms but pedophiles and undercover police.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of an Indiana man whose online efforts to proposition underage girls led him to not one, not two, but three undercover cops, none of whom apparently knew about the others.

The case began in August 2006, when aspiring sexual predator James Daniel started an online conversation with Amanda_13, a fake 13-year-old girl voiced by Sergeant Richard Howard of the Porter County Sheriff’s Department.

After several highly explicit chats, Daniel asked Amanda_13 to meet him at a park in Valparaiso, Indiana, to have sex. When he showed up, he was arrested for inducing an individual under 18 to engage in criminal sexual activity.

When Secret Service agents searched Daniel’s computer, they found logs of chats with two other apparent minors, who described themselves as 13 and 15 years old, respectively. Federal prosecutors introduced the chats at Daniel’s trial as evidence of his perverted motives.