Meet UK’s most prolific paedophile hunter who has helped catch 24 pervs in four years

Britain’s “most prolific paedophile hunter” has called for much tougher sentences for people who try to arrange meet ups with her thinking she is an underage boy.

Cheyenne O’Connor, who has posed as a schoolboy online in order to snare paedophiles, has backed proposed new sentencing guidelines for people who attempt to groom paedophile hunters in the belief that they’re actual children.

Ms O’Connor’s one-woman campaign to “clean up her community of paedophiles” has help convict 24 child sex offenders.

Now, she says, prison sentences for would-be child groomers should be increased to reflect what they were trying to do, rather than what they actually achieved.

The changes under plans put forward by the Sentencing Council, which oversees criminal sentences in England and Wales, would see courts take into account the defendant’s intended sexual harm of a child, regardless of whether a the intended victim existed or sexual activity took place.

In recent years many prosecutions have stemmed from adults posing as children online to snare offenders.

And the most prolific solo hunter is Miss O’Connor, who has caught 19 offenders in Jersey, where she lives, as well as five others on mainland Britain while using fake child accounts on dating sites.

She welcome the review and said she hoped similar sentencing would also be applied elsewhere.

She said: “I agree that paedophiles who get caught in stings should receive much higher sentences as they don’t know that the child is fake.

“The intent is clearly there. It’s only when they get caught that they start making excuses and telling the police that they were never going to do anything.

“But right from the outset, they had never known that the child wasn’t real.”

Miss O’Connor, 27, said that the maximum sentence handed down to someone she had caught was two-and-a-half years, but he had also abused a real child.

The rest had either received a prison sentence of about ten months or community service.

She added: ‘I think the sentences should be increased to reflect intent, but should not be as high as if the individual had actually abused a child.

“Abuse will affect someone mentally for the rest of their life, and so it would not be right for someone to receive the same sentence as someone who had actually committed abuse.”

The Sentencing Council has now launched a consultation on the proposals, which will end in August.

Since 2016 Cheyenne has been working in the shadows of the internet and posing online as a child to snare sexual predators.

Posing as child, she goes online, giving those making contact clear information of her supposed age early in their dialogue.

When she believes she has sufficient information to show that grooming is taking place she hands it over it to police without confronting people herself.

Cheyenne said she began her one woman mission to “clean up” her community after claiming victims were being let down.

She added: “Child abuse is a massive issue in Jersey and there is no-one else doing this but me.

“I decided to carry on based on how rubbish our justice system was and how many victims were being let down.

“The justice system is shocking when it comes to this.”