ironpony wrote:
But I don't understand why the police would waste their time. If the person is pretending to be a minor, no crime happened. So they cannot charge them with corrupting a minor if no minor was corrupted. What's the point then?
The point is that they *intended* to corrupt a minor. So this means that *if* the pretend-minor wasn't around, they would have corrupted some other minor that was real.
If someone "attempts to commit a crime" that is already a crime even if they weren't successful. For example if someone "attempts to rob a bank" but they didn't succeed robbing it, they still committed a crime just because they tried.
Here is an example. Once there was a REAL minor on a chat. And everyone were saying to each other "she is probably a cop pretending to be a minor, don't talk to her". So nobody talked to her. But actually she was a real minor. So the real minor was saved from predators.
But the reason this happened is because there were enough pretend-minors around. So pretend-minors have saved the real-minor. Thats the point of the whole thing.
Basically a real minor is unlikely to report it to the police. So in order to prevent people from contacting a real minor they have to be threatened with the pretend-minors. That is part of the reason that show is publicized so well (aside from intertainment of course).