Will County sheriff deputies investigate suspects who prey on children online

JOLIET – Will County Sheriff’s investigators have been proactively cracking down on suspects who go online to try to set up sexual encounters with children.

Between last year and this year, Sheriff’s deputies have arrested eight men who allegedly have attempted to engage in sexual acts with minors between the ages of 12 and 14, Will County Deputy Chief Dan Jungles said.

The men search for children to prey on through websites such as Craigslist or Backpage, but what they don’t know is that their potential victims aren’t real. They’re detectives with online personas.

“Generally speaking, most law enforcement is reactive, not proactive. … In this case, we’re taking the report before it even happens. We’re actively going out and trying to get rid of this problem,” Jungles said.

The sheriff’s office either has been proactive in finding child predators who search for victims online or takes on cases passed down from the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, which has a task force that investigates child exploitation crimes.

Some of the cases the sheriff’s office investigates take three to four months. Sometimes the suspects don’t show up when a meeting is established, Jungles said.

But the men who go online searching for children to exploit need to be dealt with by law enforcement and the court system, he said.

“Any crimes to children to me is the most horrid crime. … You’ve taken away the goodness of a child, and you’ve scarred them for the rest of their life. That’s why we’re trying to investigate these crimes,” Jungles said.

He said a lot of the tips in these cases come from the Illinois Attorney General’s internet crimes task force or tips from websites themselves such as eBay or AOL. When websites see something suspicious online, they report it to law enforcement, he said.

Some of the suspects the sheriff's
office said it has arrested by having deputies pose as children online
include David A. Fulghum, 73,
of Western Springs; Tomasz Potkaj, 31, of Romeoville; David H. Anderson, 56, of Oak Lawn; Jacob D. Austin, 28, of Schaumburg; and Christopher
Forster, 63, of Peotone.

Each of the men have either been charged with indecent solicitation of a child, unlawful grooming or traveling to meet a minor. All were allegedly interacting with someone they thought was a minor online and went to what they thought was going to be a meeting at a McDonald’s in Will County before they were arrested.

The strategy of nabbing child predators by posing as children online goes back farther than the past decade. Former Channahon police Detective Sgt. Dave Margliano investigated more than 300 cases since at least 1997 and helped take down the international child pornography ring known as the Wonderland Club.

Margliano said he was brought on by the Will County State’s Attorney’s Office to do investigations when he didn’t “know a data byte from a snake bite.” But after several classes, he was ready. He said he would go online with different screen names in chatrooms to set up meetings with suspects under the guise of a minor.

Most of the time, the meetings would have to be established at least twice so suspects “could not have any excuse,” he said.

“When they show up a second time, that’s when we would arrest,” he said.

Margliano said he had stopped investigating child predators online about 2007. He said he’s glad the state’s attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office still are continuing to investigate people who try to abuse children.

“There’s still child predators out there,” he said.