A Schuylkill County man was jailed overnight after allegedly getting caught in an online sex predator sting.
Richard Wright, 43, of Minersville, was arraigned on several felony charges before Magisterial District Judge Stephen Bayer and is being held at Schuylkill County Prison on $50,000 bail.
Wright was allegedly caught in a sting operation conducted by the group going by the name Creep Cleaners. In a video posted to the group’s Facebook page, they lured Wright into a sexually-based chat with a decoy portraying themselves as a 15-year-old girl who was about to turn 16.
This was the first sting executed by Creep Cleaners, a Girardville-based group. The founders of it – Shawn Roth, Randy Gilson, Seth Thomas, and a female decoy – say they were inspired to start Creep Cleaners because of local headlines. Roth said his son’s grandfather is Raymond Hall, who was recently sentenced to state prison on child sex charges.
“It hit close to home,” Roth tells Coal Region Canary
Gilson adds, “It’s pretty apparent there’s a lot of these people out there.”
The group executed the final leg of the sting on Thursday in Minersville, where a meeting was arranged with the person Wright believed was going to be a minor girl. Instead, it was the decoy from the Creep Cleaners group. He then met with Roth and began divulging information on why he continued to chat with a person he believed to be a minor.
Gilson says there were times when Wright knew he was caught in a sting operation but persisted.
“Eventually, he gave in,” Gilson says. “He was very pushy. It was crazy manipulative.”
During that encounter, Wright is shown on video admitting to chatting with a person he believed to be 15 years old. He told Roth and Gilson that he intended to just watch movies with the person he believed was underage. However, he was then asked about trying to get the underage girl to sleep over at his apartment in Minersville.
Creep Cleaners thank Minersville Police Dept. for handling the case so quickly and although the charges filed against Wright come as good news to them, Roth and Gilson say their drive is more to raise awareness of child predators online and hope parents of minors are paying close attention to their children when they’re online.
Wright is being charged with first-degree felonies for criminal solicitation of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse of a person less than 16 years old and unlawful contact with a minor as well as third-degree felonies for criminal use of a communication facility and corruption of minors. A preliminary hearing before Judge Edward Lewis in Port Carbon is scheduled for Aug. 4.
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