Between 1915 and 1919, a French man named Henri Désiré Landru murdered at least eleven women, although the police estimated the actual number of his victims to be over a hundred.

Taking advantage of the effects of the war, published advertisements in newspapers presenting himself as a well-positioned man who sought to meet a widow and, after meeting his victims, made them disappear while keeping his fortune.

Today, this way of attracting victims through the media has been refined with the emergence of the Internet. The network of networks provides a number of resources that make a trap seem like an opportunity in which the danger is surprisingly camouflaged.

But… what characteristics define predators? In what way do they act?

The Digital Predator Profile

People who set up Internet traps to meet people and murder or abuse them are mostly men between 18 and 60 years old. Beyond this physical description, however, there is a whole series of psychological and skill characteristics that explain how they act to set the trap. They are as follows:

1. They are very good at detecting vulnerabilities

The masking provided by Internet anonymity makes it surprisingly easy to learn details about victims that can be used to sense their vulnerabilities.

On the one hand, social networks offer the possibility of knowing an important amount of information about a person: musical tastes, the most visited places, how the circle of friends is, etc.

On the other hand, the fact of not being in a face-to-face dialogue with a person makes it easier to reveal intimate information , among other things because one loses the fear of seeing how the interlocutor reacts in an uncomfortable way.

These two factors mean that the digital predator can exploit his or her abilities to provide a personal image that totally matches what the other person is looking for or wants to get to know. It is easier to like each other if there are common tastes, if you pretend to have similar experiences, etc.

In other words, these people are very good at reading between the lines and imagining what the vulnerabilities are that can make the other person act in predictable ways.

2. They act alone

The possibility of acting through the Internet means that sexual predators do not need anyone’s help to weave their plan; if they want, they can pretend to be two people at once to further influence the victim, by means of fake user profiles. At the moment of plotting the trap their efforts are mainly intellectual, and in that respect they are self-sufficient and very methodical.

3. They know how to use advertising resources

Digital predators are able to design ads that are especially attractive to the intended victim profile. They use messages that catch the attention of the moment and express a clear message , and place them in forums, applications to meet people, specific virtual groups, etc.

Sometimes, they can make the content of their message fit with what is known about a potential victim so that, once published in a group with a relatively small number of people, someone will warn who is interested. If this attempt fails, the ad can be modified and republished.

This way of attracting victims makes the other person’s defenses go down, since one enters into a psychological framework in which it is the victim who must “seduce” the predator, which makes the predator have a lot of room for manoeuvre.

4. The abuse of depersonalization

Depersonalization, which consists of perceiving others as if they were objects, is one of the characteristics of people with a high level of psychopathy or narcissism, and in the case of digital predators it is also very present.

The Internet only reinforces this degree of depersonalisation, which makes the potential feeling of guilt, which is already very low in psychopaths, disappear almost completely .

The digital media predator takes advantage of both the options of covering his identity with a false user profile and the benefits of not having to interact face to face with the other person until the trap is set and “there is no turning back”.

5. Set long-term goals

In cases where the trap is not an advertisement, sexual predators who seek victims through the Internet are able to set a long-term goal so that the time to stay seems a natural step and one with fewer implications.

Nowadays it is relatively normal to have constant contact with people who do not know each other in person, and this makes these kinds of traps hidden. At first it may be that there is little conversation and that after a few weeks you start to talk. This is because by the time the dialogue has started, the victim has already begun to get used to the presence (virtual, for the moment) of the other.

Contrary to popular belief, sexual predators do not have to be clearly impulsive, and in fact this is penalized ; in the case of those who act through the Internet, your plan needs to have a series of intermediate steps to work.