As they chatted online, the men might have imagined what the 15-year-old looked like.

They might have pictured a pretty blond girl, maybe a brunette.

Ed Sexton’s smooth bald head and the bristling whiskers of his mustache almost certainly didn’t come to mind.

But on the Internet, you can be whoever you say you are, and Sexton’s chat profile says he’s a 15-year-old girl in Lincoln.

The last part’s right.

Sexton is a police investigator in Lincoln who this summer busted three men he says tried to meet him for sex when he posed online as an underage girl.

The arrests, although few, highlight a danger young people face, said Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning.

“There are Internet predators surfing the Web right now looking for our children,” he said. “Right here in Lincoln, Nebraska, all across the state, this kind of thing is happening. And it’s a scary situation.”

Last year nearly one in seven Internet users ages 10 to 17 received unwanted sexual solicitations, and one in three saw sexual material they didn’t intend to see, according to a 2006 national study funded through a grant to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“They have to navigate some pretty treacherous waters out there,” said Col. Bryan Tuma, of the Nebraska State Patrol.

After watching a Nebraska State Patrol demonstration a little more than a year ago, Sarpy County Attorney Lee Polikov said, he left feeling guilty his county had not done anything. The statistics were appalling, he said, but he guessed they may be even higher.

“You cannot go into one of those chat rooms with any kind of indication that you’re a minor child and not be solicited. It happens in numbers, large numbers,” Polikov said.

Soon after, his office formed a working group, pulling together law enforcement investigators and his staff. They’ve trained and made arrests. They have four open cases now, he said.

Some have argued it’s entrapment or a freedom of speech violation, but Polikov is confident Nebraska’s child enticement law can stand up, as it has in other states.

At a WebSafe conference Friday in Lincoln, police officers and prosecutors trained to help them identify online predators and prosecute the cases.

“There are so many predators out there that sometimes it feels like we’re not making a dent,” Bruning said. “But we’ve got to continue prosecuting these cases because I’m convinced there’s a deterrent effect.”

That’s why he thinks it’s important to spread the word to the “bad guys.”

“They will know that we’re out there looking and that they have a significant chance of bumping into law enforcement when they think they’re bumping into 13-year-old Becky,” Bruning said. “That’s a big part of this.”

Another part is getting the word to parents and letting them know it’s OK to do such things as put the family computer in the living room and use monitoring software, he said.

“Parents, teachers, law enforcement officers, we all have a role to play,” Bruning said.

In a police interview room this summer, Sexton said, it’s not like the “Dateline” hidden-camera investigations where as many as 51 men around the country show up to allegedly have sex with teens after chatting with people who are in fact from a news show.

Arrests rarely come so quickly and right in a row, like they did over the past few months, he said, mostly because he’s not in chat rooms full-time.

“Part of it’s just timing.”

Sexton has taken training to learn the lingo and how teenagers chat. But mostly he just waits. It may take a few minutes or a few months for someone to approach, looking for sex with an underage girl, and take steps to follow through.

The things some say they want to do would make many parents of 15-year-olds blush. If the would-be perpetrators take an overt act to follow through, like driving to a park to meet, authorities arrest them.

That’s what police say happened last Monday evening about 8:15 at University Place Park. According to court records, a young-looking officer in plain clothes, walked up to Shane A. Brown’s car. Police say the 33-year-old Lincoln man said he was Denny, the name he’d used in online chats, where he made it known he was interested in having sex with the underage girl.

On Aug. 1, police say, the same thing happened, only that time, the man used his own name. Thirteen minutes into a chat, 32-year-old Chiranjib Banerjee allegedly made his intentions known, according to the affidavit for his arrest. He arranged to meet a 15-year-old at Belmont Plaza, then went there. Police arrested him within minutes.

A week earlier, Sexton’s online chats with another Lincoln man, 34-year-old Daniel J. Madsen, culminated in a meeting and arrest at Bethany Park.

They’d chatted, off and on, since May 30, Sexton said in the affidavit for Madsen’s arrest. A young officer agreed to be a decoy and walked up to Madsen’s car. Police say he was exposing himself, and the officer took a picture.

The three recent cases — Brown, who is set to return to court Oct. 12; Madsen, who is set for trial next month; and Banerjee who is set for preliminary hearing this month — aren’t the norm, Sexton said.

There’s a trend making the people who follow through more cautious, he said. They know law enforcement is on the Internet, impersonating young kids, and they’re changing their tactics.

“And it’s making it more difficult for us,” Sexton said.

It may mean fewer underage victims, he said, but a lot of them are willing victims.

That’s where parents come in.

Sexton said parents should educate their children about the dangers of meeting people online and should make sure they understand what can happen if they do.

He’s got mixed feelings when it comes to young people and instant messaging.

It’s a method of communication being used more and more in business. For young people to keep up, they’re going to need to know how it works, Sexton said.

“On the other side of it though, you’ve got kids who do this unsupervised, and the parents don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

That makes it easier for predators to find kids, to groom them and, ultimately, to meet them for sex, Sexton said.

Really there’s not a lot that’s new on the Internet, he said.

“It just expands the pool of victims, that’s what it does.”

Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.

By the numbers

Lincoln police have arrested five men on allegations of enticing a child with a computer since the law went into effect in April 2004.

This summer, police arrested three men, two within a week, after they chatted online with someone they thought was a 15-year-old girl. In fact, it was Police Investigator Ed Sexton.

In 2005, three men were arrested on the same allegation.

For more information about the dangers and how to surf safer, go to tcs.cybertipline.com.