To Catch a Predator
American reality television series focusing on exposing pedophiles through sting operations
To Catch a Predator is an American reality television series in the television news magazine program Dateline NBC. The program features confrontations by host Chris Hansen, partly filmed with a hidden camera, with adult men arriving at a sting house to have sex with a minor. The men are typically arrested as a result, with the minors being adults impersonating underage persons in online chats.
The series premiered in November 2004. It followed twelve undercover sting operations as they were conducted across the United States with the watchdog group Perverted-Justice. Following the third investigation, law enforcement and other officials became involved, leading to the arrests of most individuals caught. Upon its airing, the series received mixed reactions for its sordid tone, and the ethical and legal concerns raised over the nature of the sting operations it depicted, in particular potential violations of entrapment laws.
The show was cancelled in 2008 following the suicide of Rockwall County, Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt as police attempted to serve him with a search warrant after he was caught talking to and exchanging pictures with a Perverted-Justice volunteer posing as a 13-year-old boy. Conradt fatally shot himself as police and an NBC camera crew entered his home, an act that was captured by the filming crew. His estate sued Dateline for $105 million, then settled out of court. Hansen stated that To Catch a Predator ended because it had simply run its course, though he later ran a Kickstarter campaign to relaunch the series.
“To Catch a Predator” enters the record as american reality television series focusing on exposing pedophiles through sting operations. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Catch, Predator and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2121677. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “To Catch a Predator” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.