Late on a Saturday night in McAllen, Texas, Sanjay Singhania was awoken by a call from a phone number he didn’t recognize. The man on the line said that Mr. Singhania’s son, Akash, was being arrested.
The stranger was not trying to be helpful. He sounded amused.
Mr. Singhania hung up and tried to call Akash, 25, who lived in Dallas but was visiting Los Angeles. He did not pick up.
The family had turned on location sharing on their iPhones, so Mr. Singhania could see where Akash was: Santa Ana, just south of Los Angeles. Mr. Singhania called the Santa Ana police department while his wife called their other son to get him searching, too.
Akash’s brother found him. He sent his parents a link to a show on the livestreaming service Kick called “CATCHING CHILD PREDATORS!” Mr. Singhania’s wife slipped a nitroglycerin pill under her tongue because she felt as if she was going to have a heart attack.
Not long before, in a suburban park 1,500 miles away in Santa Ana, a half dozen people crouched behind a vine-covered wall, whispering and pumping themselves up for a confrontation. They were led by a man in a hooded sweatshirt named Vitaly who provided a running commentary to a camera, energy drink in hand. Akash was coming to the park to hook up with a woman he had met online. The woman had been texting Akash on a hookup app, but she was a decoy working with Vitaly and his crew, and told them that Akash thought she was 16.
Vitaly shadowboxed with a tree while waiting for Akash and the woman to walk past the hiding spot. As the minutes passed, the number of people watching the livestream ticked up to more than 24,000. Akash and the woman finally appeared and, as the woman peeled off, Vitaly sprung out of hiding. He rushed toward Akash, calling out “Mr. Mumbai” and dancing around him in a crude Bollywood style, singing in a bad Indian accent, “You want to rape a 16-year-old.”
In the chat accompanying the livestream on Kick, viewers were piling on like a crowd cheering on a gladiator. “Deport,” one wrote. “KILL HIM NOW!!!” another said.
Akash at first looked confused, but then an expression of recognition crossed his face as he took in the camera crew: He knew what kind of video this was. He had seen ones like it before. As a 20-something man in America, he was the target audience. He also knew they had made a mistake. “She never told me she was 16,” he protested, immediately scrolling through the dating app messages on his phone for proof.
Vitaly acted contrite for a beat. “My bad, bro,” he said. But the decoy insisted she had the goods. Fifteen minutes later, the police arrived and took Akash away.
Akash had been ensnared by a business venture that traffics in public humiliation as entertainment. That he was innocent of what he was accused of only served to draw a bigger crowd.
‘Pred’ Catchers
Akash Singhania had been in California trying to woo customers. He ran a vending machine start-up that stocked products targeted to young men, like vaping supplies, Pokémon cards and CBD gummies. Now he was ready to return home to Dallas. But it was the weekend, he was in Los Angeles, and he was hoping to have some fun.
He turned to a dating app called Pure, which lets people connect for casual, anonymous sexual encounters. He chatted with a woman and they agreed to meet up that night, in her neighborhood in Santa Ana.
When he was ambushed, he recognized the group’s leader, Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, a Russian-born provocateur. Known online simply as Vitaly, he had been one of the kings of YouTube for his outrageous pranks, like kissing women he had just met or grunting and running around downtown Miami in a bloody, ripped-up dress shirt, pretending to be a zombie. As a teenager, Akash had enjoyed such videos on YouTube, and while Vitaly’s pranks were a little too shocking and cringe-inducing for his tastes, he had watched them.
Vitaly’s online content and real world behavior had become only more extreme over time. He was charged with felony battery in 2020 for attacking a woman in Miami — the case ended in a deferred prosecution agreement — and he was imprisoned for nine months in the Philippines in 2025 after livestreaming himself harassing people and stealing a security guard’s motorcycle. Though he had 10 million followers on YouTube, in 2024, Vitaly joined Kick, an Australian-based livestreaming service, and it became his primary platform for posting new content.
His main shtick on Kick was predator catching, an established social media genre practiced by so-called pedophile hunters across the country looking to rack up clicks. Supposed child predators — or “preds” in the shorthand — make easy targets because they get little sympathy when harassed, and combative harassment often goes viral.
The model was popularized by “To Catch A Predator.” The show, inspired by earlier online vigilantes, had 20 episodes and ended in 2007 after NBC was sued by the family of a man who died by suicide while a camera crew was outside his home. The case settled after a judge ruled that a “reasonable jury could find that NBC crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement.”
Despite the potential legal risks, Vitaly and other streamers generally followed the show’s playbook: paying decoys to pose as minors online to lure men and then confronting them on camera. Vitaly sometimes included a flare of absurdity by bringing in a live alligator to confront an alleged predator, or the singer Akon to do a performance.
Vitaly did not respond to requests to be interviewed. His lawyer, Doug Johnson, said that “Vitaly categorically denies any allegations of illegality or intentional wrongdoing.”
“Reporting predators to law enforcement has been a central component of Vitaly’s mission,” Mr. Johnson said in an emailed statement. “In almost all cases, Vitaly’s team contacted law enforcement. There were limited exceptions in which local authorities advised the team that they would not respond and to stop calling.”
Akash did not watch Kick, but clips from Vitaly’s predator catching videos had shown up on his social media feeds. He had always thought they were doing something noble.
‘That’s Not Me’
The decoy who lured Akash was referred to on the video as “Joslyn.” Decoys message as many men as possible, sometimes talking on the phone or video calling them to establish they are real. They are paid a bounty of a few hundred dollars per “pred” who actually shows up, according to Rayma McClure, who worked as a producer with Vitaly and was interviewed by JiDion, another predator catcher on YouTube.
Vitaly and his crew broadcast themselves for almost nine hours that Saturday evening, many of them spent inside an extra-large S.U.V. Vitaly chattered away in a captain’s chair in the middle row, trying to keep the audience entertained while the decoys sat in the third row behind him, glued to their phones trying to arrange meet-ups. Vitaly was normally based in Miami, but he was changing things up and pedophile hunting in Los Angeles. Court records show that he had attended a hearing there the week before over a misdemeanor charge for aiding and abetting illegal street racing.
Before meeting up with Akash, the team had enticed a man to a Target, though he bolted quickly, the camera lingering on his license plate as he drove away.
Akash did not run away. He wanted to establish his innocence as quickly as possible. He asked Vitaly and his crew to read the messages between him and the decoy to see that she had never said she was 16. This forced him to disclose what they had talked about: a BDSM kink of role-playing nonconsensual sex, which was embarrassing to share with the world.
But the decoy claimed they’d moved the conversation from the dating app over to Snapchat and read a message she said she had sent to Akash there: “I want to be totally honest. I lied on there. I’m 16.”
Akash looked at the message on her phone in disbelief. “That’s not me,” he said. “That’s not my account.”
According to Santiago Rose, who has previously worked with Vitaly on predator stings, but was not involved in this one, his team of decoys trawl at least four different dating and social media apps, so they are juggling many conversations at once. It seemed clear to Akash that Vitaly and his crew were not interested in carefully reviewing the evidence. They continued shouting, surrounding him, talking over one another.
So Akash called the police.
The dispatcher asked for his name, and made him spell it out.
Now the livestream audience knew exactly who he was. “LMAO doxxed himself,” one viewer wrote.
It was like blood in the water. Idle entertainment turned into a hunt. “Found his Facebook,” one wrote. Someone posted a link to his Instagram page and the name of his company, and his father’s name and the name of his father’s business.
Akash received harassing phone calls, and hundreds of text and social media messages, and his family received a handful as well. A New York City college student made the call that woke up Akash’s father.
The police arrived about 10 minutes after Akash called 911. One of the officers recognized Vitaly and shook his hand. They, too, knew this genre of livestream, and their actions were captured on camera. Before driving away with Akash handcuffed in the back of their vehicle, the officers asked for a photo with the infamous prankster.
‘Perfect Guy, Perfect Clip’
Only Vitaly’s most dedicated fans follow his livestream on Kick. Most people see his predator-catching antics, as Akash Singhania himself had, in video clips on other social media platforms.
Kick was created in 2022 by the owners of Stake, an online casino, after the livestreaming giant Twitch barred it and several other online gambling sites. Stake and other online casinos now offer lucrative deals to high-profile Kick creators, who, in return, livestream themselves gambling, according to streamers who spoke with The New York Times. Stake confirmed that it had a “creator arrangement” with Vitaly.
To build its consumer base, Kick has invested in what one of its executives called a “clipping network.” To get content from Kick livestreams in front of bigger audiences on other, more popular platforms, Kick uses so-called clippers — people who identify the best bits of streams and post them as short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. The clippers get paid if their posts rack up more than 1,000 views on those other sites.
Social media platforms have in recent years changed their algorithms from ones that primarily show you what your friends share online, to ones that surface what’s most popular with users as a whole. Paid clips exploit this design, making it look like the content is authentically popular with users to boost the presence of the clips in other people’s feeds. Creators like Vitaly get more attention, and those who follow his links back to Kick are primed to learn about Stake, the online gambling business.
Kick recently claimed to have hit a milestone of 100 million users, and Stake has nearly doubled its revenue since the launch of Kick, to $4.7 billion in 2024.
After Vitaly joined Kick, he posted a video soliciting clippers. He said that he had a $200,000 budget and opened a briefcase full of fake money, with the logo for Stake, the casino, on the outside.
In the livestream, Vitaly tried to manage the interactions for clip creation. At one point, he made a taunting racist joke about Akash being smart because he was Indian, which one of his crew interrupted. Vitaly shouted at him angrily. “Bro, again in the middle of me talking — I was getting a perfect farm clip,” he said, using a stream of expletives. “Clip farming” refers to a streamer performing a shocking act knowing it will generate attention later.
In the hours after the encounter in Santa Ana, video clips of Vitaly mocking Akash ricocheted around the internet and the world. Akash’s parents had emigrated from India, and his cousins there texted him because they were seeing it go viral.
After the police took Akash away, Vitaly remarked to the camera: “Perfect guy, perfect clip.”
It was approaching midnight, and Vitaly decided he was done hunting preds for the night. When he got back to the room where he was staying, though, he kept the livestream going on his laptop for an hour-and-a-half as he played Keno on Stake.
Online gambling is illegal in California, and Stake told The Times it does not operate there. The City of Los Angeles is suing Stake, Kick and their parent company for facilitating illegal gambling in the state. The company said it “rejects the allegations in the Los Angeles lawsuit.”
The Crowd Finds a New Villain
While Vitaly gambled in front of a dwindling live audience, the police questioned Mr. Singhania and reviewed the contents of his phone. After the interrogation, a Santa Ana police officer spoke with Akash’s father, who recorded the call.
“Your son was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” the officer said.
The officer spoke sympathetically and said that Akash was innocent, but that the police could not address the harassment he had faced from the pedophile hunters. He said that was a civil matter. The Santa Ana police department confirmed that they questioned and released Akash, and that he was not the subject of an investigation.
Akash said he managed to reach Vitaly the next day via private message on X. He said that he had sent him the document showing his release from police custody as well as his father’s recording, and that he had spoken by phone with Vitaly, who said his team had messed up and he was firing all of them. (“Vitaly’s decoy mistakenly told him that she had told Mr. Singhania that she was 16 years old,” Mr. Johnson, Vitaly’s lawyer said. “Vitaly had no knowledge of Akash Singhania before the decoy arranged the meet-up.”)
“You need to tell everyone I’m innocent,” Akash recalled saying.
On the next Monday, Vitaly posted a mea culpa on X and asked his followers to stop contacting them. “My team and I mistakenly portrayed Akash Singhania as a child predator,” he wrote. “I apologize to Mr. Singhania, his family, his friends, and anyone else affected by this mistake.”
Vitaly deleted that night’s episode from his Kick account, and his lawyer said he “actively attempted to pull down any clips with Mr. Singhania.” One company that paid people to clip Vitaly’s show asked them to delete clips they’d posted from that night, according to a message reviewed by The Times. But it was too late. His army of clippers — people trying to make a quick buck — had thoroughly seeded it online.
The ubiquitous clips helped fuel a new shaming cycle, but now there was a new target: Vitaly himself. Vitaly’s apology got nearly five million views. The Santa Ana clips went viral again with new commentary: “Vitaly FALSELY accused an innocent man of being a pred,” one said. “Internet personality Vitaly Zdorovetskiy is officially ‘cooked’ after a predator sting gone horribly wrong,” said another.
Commentary about Vitaly’s screw-up got millions of views.
Kick suspended Vitaly’s account.
Akash’s legal team at Sheppard said he was considering his legal options, including filing a defamation case or a settlement of claims outside of litigation.
Akash said he was recently at an airport in Florida waiting for an Uber, when someone recognized him and asked if he was the guy from Vitaly’s video. He lied and said he wasn’t. He said he continued to get harassing messages, and prank calls to his personal phone, and his mind goes back often to the feeling of sitting in the back of a police car, thinking his life was over. He said he would never use an online dating app again. “I don’t really trust anyone,” he said. “You never know who anyone could be.”
As for Vitaly, after a month of radio silence, his Kick account came back online in mid-May. In his first livestream after the ban, he said he planned to keep catching predators, this time in Europe. He thanked Kick and thanked Stake. And then he spent an hour gambling on Stake’s digital slot machines while his audience watched. He had survived the internet justice cycle, his platform intact.
Natalie Reneau contributed video production.