A retired French sports teacher is in custody after being caught making sexual propositions online to a 14 year-old girl.
Except that the 14 year-old girl was not a 14 year-old girl.
She was an AI-generated face and voice being operated by a popular, male influencer, who specialises in the entrapment of paedophiles.
The 66-year-old ex-teacher – named as Dominique B – turned himself in to police in eastern France on Tuesday, a day after his conversation with the “girl” was broadcast on several platforms.
In the video, Dominique B can be seen on one side of the screen, lounging in a chair. On the other side is the influencer, known as FINNYZYY, with a girl’s face and voice superimposed.
The visual alteration was not brilliant – the influencer has to cover the bottom of his chin to hide his beard – but it was clearly enough to fool the retired teacher.
In the 40 minute chat – seen live by more than 40,000 viewers and around a million times since – Dominique B suggests meeting the “girl” at the Parc des Princes football stadium in Paris.
He asks if she would like to kiss him, if she has ever shared nude photos of herself with friends, and if she would like to see him naked.
When he is reminded that “she” is only 14, he dismisses the objection on the grounds that many girls “younger than that have already made love”.
The man was recognised by some viewers who alerted Pharos, France’s state-run platform for whistleblowers reporting content online.
Before they could act, Dominique B took himself to a local police station.
The state prosecutor in Vesoul said he faced charges of making sexual advances to a person of under 15 years of age, and of soliciting an image of a minor for pornographic purposes.
A former official for the National Union of School Sports (UNSS), his case has raised questions about the ethics of this kind of entrapment.
According to FINNYZYY, his aim is “to raise the alert… so that people understand how serious is the problem (of child sex abuse)”.
But lawyer and commentator Mourad Battikh said he found the influencer’s methods “very worrying”.
“We need to ask: is he really aiming to work with police, or does he just want to create a buzz? Because if he really wanted to be a good citizen, he could simply have taken the video to the police without putting it on the Internet,” he told news channel BFMTV.
Aurélien Martini of the USM magistrates’ union said that citizen vigilantes “risked disrupting genuine police investigations that might already be under way into a suspect”.
But FINNMYZYY received support from the far-right National Rally party with deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy saying he was glad “civil society is mobilised against this unspeakable phenomenon… The reaction of the political class has been so feeble”.
It is not clear what difference the fact that Dominique B was not in reality seeking sexual favours from an adolescent girl – but from a man pretending to be an adolescent girl – would make in any criminal trial.
