With over 66,000 followers on Twitter, Stinson Hunter is a self-styled online crime fighter.Best known for having appeared on the Channel 4 documentary The Paedophile Hunter in October 2014, Hunter was expelled from three schools and jailed for arson as a child. A subsequent university dropout, made his first “sting” on a suspected paedophile in 2008 and properly began his operation to catch such individuals in 2012. Of his activities, he once commented: “It started with a profile on a dating site and a guy contacted us, telling us he was a 47-year-old mental health nurse. We got him in a Birmingham hotel under the pretense of a 14-year-old virgin and we videoed it. We wanted to raise awareness for public safety on Facebook so we put it up online and have done it ever since, honing our technique”. Though some think him irresponsible, Hunter – who seeks neither fame nor fortune from what he does – has been lauded for “succeed[ing] in warning parents of the perils of social networking and the monsters that lurk behind keyboards in the UK”.
