On July 8, 2018, Norman Achin, a 50-year-old public school teacher from Northern Virginia, signed up for the adults-only dating app Grindr. AlexVA contacted him two days later. Soon after they began communicating, AlexVA informed Achin that he was 14 years old. “I was seeking for some erotic entertainment. “Didn’t expect to run meet someone your age,” Achin responded on July 12 via the app. “I’m not interested in that kind of connection with a boy.” The following day, he reported AlexVA to Grindr for breaking its terms of service, and Grindr suspended AlexVA’s account.
In actuality, AlexVA was a Fairfax County Police Department officer who had been chatting with a number of males on Grindr as part of an undercover investigation.
On July 22, Achin sent a nude photo to the suspended AlexVA account—he claims he has no idea how it happened and that he had been chatting with other Grindr users, all of whom were adults. Achin had previously made similar errors. On July 12, he sent texts to AlexVA intended for another adult user. AlexVA answered, but did not inform Achin that he had the wrong person until they had been trading messages for several hours. Achin apologized.
“You want something with an adult,” he texted AlexVA. “That’s a poor idea. “Don’t you see?”
Despite Achin’s apparent efforts to discourage AlexVA from seeking sex with adults, he was arrested on July 23, and a Fairfax County judge found him guilty of using a communications device to entice a child in May 2019.
According to state records, Achin had no prior criminal history, and the prosecutor did not present evidence at trial that he had ever sexually molested minors or possessed child pornography. Nonetheless, Achin was sentenced to seven months in prison and placed on the state’s sex offender registry. He lost his job as a public school teacher as well as his pension. He now works in retail and does freelance work to make ends meet and pay off thousands of dollars in legal debt, he claims.
Achin’s arrest was part of a larger trend in police. From 2018 to 2020, law enforcement agencies across the country conducted nearly 2,500 “proactive” sting investigations. These investigations are carried out by special task teams supported by the federal government as part of a national effort to punish online sex crimes against children. (The latest year for which data is available for most task forces is 2020.)
However, the law enforcement agencies that manage these task forces are funded in part based on how many arrests and convictions they make. This may provide an incentive to undertake fictitious-victim sting operations, which are frequently less expensive and time-consuming than inquiries into crimes involving genuine victims. However, experts on child trafficking say it’s unclear how many crimes against children these stings actually prevent, and the federal government hasn’t investigated whether the money spent on these task teams is actually preventing children from being victimized.
