The Rise and Fall of a Pedophile Hunter
After YouTube star Vitaly Zdorovetskiy was arrested in April 2020 for randomly beating a woman jogging in Miami Beach, it appeared that his career was over. TMZ ran a story with side-by-side pictures, contrasting her injuries — a bloody eye, a visibly swollen eye socket, and stitches at the tail of her brow — with a mug shot of a platinum-blond Zdorovetskiy, sunburned and shirtless, looking anything but remorseful. He’s smiling, and his pupils are dilated. He would later say he’d been high on a heavy dose of magic mushrooms.
Up to this point, the Russian-born Zdorovetskiy spent nearly a decade as a pioneering video star and prankster, amassing more than 1.5 billion total views along with a small fortune he says reached tens of millions of dollars. (Justin Bieber called him his favorite YouTuber.) His first hit in 2012, titled “Miami Zombie Attack Prank!,” made him famous overnight. The video involved him running around a predominantly Black neighborhood growling at people while dressed as a zombie. He based the prank on the notorious cannibalistic attack of a homeless man in Miami a few months earlier, infamously blamed on bath salts. For the next decade, his content consisted of a variety of prank videos and controversial stunts, like illegally climbing to the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and streaking at various major sporting events: the World Cup final, the NBA Finals, and the World Series. (Both his ex-girlfriend and mother joined in for that last category; they stormed the Champions League final and Cricket World Cup final, respectively, scantily clad and wearing shirts promoting one of his other ventures, a website that blended soft-core porn and pranks.)
While the charges were dropped after Zdorovetskiy and the woman reached a private settlement, his sponsors severed ties with him. His image had taken a fatal hit. He thought about killing himself. His livelihood depended on making a comeback — one that would involve him innovating a popular genre of content and finding new platforms that wouldn’t punish or censor him. He would become a pedophile hunter.
Chris Hansen, who practically invented the genre, describes Zdorovetskiy’s work as “Borat meets Grand Theft Auto.” He says that he sees his content on social media all the time, oftentimes accompanied with pleas for the two to collaborate. These sorts of streamers “are looking for drama and clicks, and they’re creating danger and sometimes committing crimes in and of themselves,” he says.
He would know. In 2008, NBC canceled To Catch a Predator after 14 seasons after one of the show’s targets committed suicide during one of Hansen’s sting operations. The media circus that followed put Hansen under extreme public scrutiny. He remained relevant, however, largely through the rise of YouTube and social media. Today, he has a podcast, Predators I’ve Caught, and a streaming service called TruBlu, where he hosts Takedown, a show modeled after Predator: “We have our own franchise. It shines a light on a very important problem. It creates a dialogue and awareness. I hope it reminds parents to have a very open conversation and relationship with their kids when it comes to this online stuff.”
Zdorovetskiy’s work follows the same plot as that of To Catch a Predator: “Hunters” pose as underage on various dating apps, lure their target somewhere using a “decoy” (someone of age who looks younger), then expose the supposed predator. Zdorovetskiy’s targets are men, and the decoys are almost entirely men posing as underage on dating apps like Tinder, Grindr, or Sniffies. Unlike on Predator, these stings aren’t sanctioned by law enforcement and only a few of his targets end up arrested.
What separates Zdorovetskiy from other streamers — from vigilantes like Alex Rosen of the group Predator Poachers or Tommy Fellows of Colorado Ped Patrol — is not his interest in justice but a combination of superior production value, name recognition, and the gratuitousness with which he humiliates his targets. In one video, he threatens to deport a supposed pedophile; in another, he threatens to feed them to a real-looking fake alligator. There is an intense shock value to the videos, which feel almost pornographic, inasmuch as throngs of people watch his content to see others humiliated for acting on taboo desires. If that sounds surprising, it’s probably because his content is not designed to be easy to consume by the general public. Zdorovetskiy’s audience is young and, as he says, 99 percent male.
His specific innovation was to make his videos overtly theatrical. Part of this was bringing along celebrities for the hunt. In one video, the singer Akon performs his hit “Locked Up,” accompanied by Zdorovetskiy in a Native American costume, while the alleged predator is arrested by police in the background. (In a later interview, Akon said he felt bad about the video and that the man didn’t seem “all there.”) Zdorovetskiy usually teams up with rappers, such as YG, the Game, and Ty Dolla $ign.
In one stream, Zdorovetskiy and the rapper Lil Pump beat up a man, who later sued, claiming that he didn’t speak English and that he’d been lured onto a boat with the promise of getting paid to clean it. At the end of that stream, Zdorovetskiy asks the Texas-based TikTok-famous lawyer Alain Jayoma, “He is not illegal? He has a green card like me?” Jayoma responds affirmatively. “So we beat the shit out of this guy for nothing?” Zdorovetskiy asks.
His comeback began when he decided to make the switch from YouTube to the streaming platforms Rumble and Kick. In the period leading up to the Miami Beach assault, Zdorovetskiy had claimed that more and more of his videos were getting demonetized by YouTube as the platform was tightening content moderation. Standards on Rumble and Kick were significantly looser with the latter essentially unmoderated. In 2022, Kick was spun out of stake.com, an unregulated cryptocurrency-based betting website incorporated in Curaçao and banned in the United States and United Kingdom. (Some streamers, including one who goes by xQC — who reportedly signed a two-year $70 million contract to exclusively stream with Kick — have told journalists they are paid by Kick to gamble on Stake during streams. Zdorovetskiy would regularly gamble on streams, but it’s unconfirmed whether Kick paid him to do so.) While Kick is not necessarily a household name, it claims to have 58 million users and sponsors a Formula 1 team.
Zdorovetskiy’s stunts feature elaborate production. A former associate shares with me a behind-the-scenes video on the condition of anonymity. In the featured sting, Zdorovetskiy had the decoy pose as a boy and lure the target to a Hollywood movie theater, which Zdorovetskiy had rented out and populated with extras to make it look like a normal movie screening. The decoy and target sit down and are being recorded as fake movie trailers start playing. One begins with Zdorovetskiy himself onscreen. “Ladies and gentlemen, an announcement in the movie theater,” he announces. “We have a pedophile.” A spotlight falls on the man and the decoy. Zdorovetskiy runs into the theater, stops in front of the target, and starts pouring liquid (it’s water) from a gasoline tank on himself, threatening to commit suicide. Then he and the episode’s guest, the boxer-influencer Ryan Garcia, half-heartedly chase the target out of the theater and down the street. He gets away; Zdorovetskiy can’t legally stop him, as the former associate reminds me.
It’s the sort of content that appeals to young men such as Santiago Tafoya, 24, who has been a fan of Zdorovetskiy since he was a teenager. In early 2024, the two met at Zoo Culture, an Instagram-popular gym in California’s San Fernando Valley. (It’s run by a fitness influencer named Bradley Martyn, who features in a sting that implicated the successful Hollywood screenwriter Herschel Weingrod.) That’s where Tafoya says he and a friend pitched Zdorovetskiy on the theater idea. It was their first collaboration, and according to Tafoya, “Next thing you know, this was his biggest comeback.”
Tafoya had taken part in about 20 stings before he met Zdorovetskiy. He tells me that To Catch a Predator had inspired him. He and his friend, also named Santiago, were accused by Albuquerque police of felony false imprisonment for not letting a man leave during a sting until he read from a shirt that said “I Came Here to Meet an Underage Child and All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt.” “So we completed the whole season with warrants,” he says of working with Zdorovetskiy. “That was before we knew the rules on how to catch predators, but now we’ve mastered them and know the limits and what to do and what not to do.”
Over the next three seasons, Tafoya helped produce Zdorovetskiy’s videos. He walks me through how it worked. He and others would pose as decoys, spending whole days trying to find predators on the apps and “test the waters” in different neighborhoods, usually in Miami and Los Angeles. He tells me how the private-security guards who featured prominently in the videos weren’t there to intimidate the targets or protect Zdorovetskiy but “to protect the predator” because “Vitaly is crazy.”
Tafoya describes an operation that was more cash-strapped than social media might have you believe: It took a whole season to land the first paid Kick deal, according to him, and he tells me that the payouts from Kick maxed out at around $100,000 gross per episode. The way that Kick pays its various streamers remains somewhat mysterious, but Tafoya says that for most of the first seasons, Kick paid the team directly. For season three, however, Kick wanted them to do it for free, he says. Season three fizzled out, he explains, because they first tried spinoffs — “Catching cheaters, catching home-wreckers,” Tafoya says — then, after those didn’t pull in the necessary views, they returned to pedophile content to mixed success. Zdorovetskiy fired a couple decoys, Tafoya says, including one for “getting too big” and not looking “like a little kid.”
The pressure was on to keep producing. “We’re used to catching three a day, but now we are catching one, two, one, one. We were struggling because he wants a predator, like, Tuesday, and it’s Monday,” Tafoya says. After he did a video with streamer Mikki Mase last December, a rival of Zdorovetskiy’s, he says he was fired. Feeling betrayed, Tafoya tells me that he tried pranking his old boss: “I thought it would be an amazing idea to prank the world’s best prankster.” He went about setting up a fake account to meet one of the new decoys. When he crashed the “sting” on Zdorovetskiy’s livestream, wearing a balaclava, security guards attacked him with guns raised. “Dave, Dave, Dave, it’s me,” Tafoya pleaded to one of the guards as everyone slowly realized what was going on. Zdorovetskiy told the guard, “You should have popped him.”
This past spring, Zdorovetskiy and his mother, who makes regular appearances in his stings and streams, visited the Philippines, where they produced a series of strange, but not out of the ordinary, livestream episodes, including one titled “VITALY X MOM VISIT THE MOST DANGEROUS HOOD IN MANILA.” On April 1, things took a turn. During a livestream in Bonifacio Global City, outside Manila, he started harassing random people: He stole a security guard’s hat, tried to steal another’s gun, asked a guard if he could shove a banana up somewhere private — then drove off momentarily with the guard’s motorcycle — and yelled, scared, and harassed over a dozen people in the span of a half-hour of streaming. The next day, he was arrested on charges of harassment and theft and is still being held behind bars.
The panic around pedophiles — witness Jeffrey Epstein — means business and not just for Zdorovetskiy. When I started reporting this story, I created a new Instagram account to reach out to prospective sources and was immediately hit with an algorithm that fed me content tailored to pedophile-hunting. Video after video populated my feed advertising the money to be made by blackmailing pedophiles online, though it became obvious pretty quickly that the bountiful “life after catching p3d0s” that was promised in the videos, replete with BMWs and stacks of cash, was itself some sort of multi-level-marketing scheme. I joined a Telegram channel attached to one of the accounts publishing these videos. A user provided the specifics. They were selling an e-book guide for $47 that “teaches you how to get started,” $30 ready-made Snapchat accounts “with good snap score,” a $27 “Pack of Pics” for catfishing, and differently priced bundles of accounts and starting packs. One could also buy a “HUSTLER BUNDLE” for $85, which includes the “3 essentials” (the pictures, Snapchat accounts, and guide), and finally one could sign up for one-on-one mentoring for a mere $250. The user called the work “e-whoring.”
I messaged the user, asking what kind of feedback he’d gotten from the mentorship program. He told me that “many give up, but the few that don’t and listen make the most right now.” From there, I continued perusing and found other users on Instagram selling e-books on how to “start catfishing from scratch.” A few appeared to be boys in high school. One user offered a sale: “Summer is here, time to rack up pedos, don’t let last year repeat itself. Action always wins.”
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