Dateline NBC's investigative series sends decoy adults into online chatrooms posing as young teenagers, then tracks what happens when the men who arrange meetings actually show up. Working with the watchdog group Perverted-Justice, correspondent Chris Hansen sits inside a rented house wired with hidden cameras, waiting for each man to walk in expecting a child and instead finding a television crew and a stack of printed chat logs. The confrontations follow a pattern: denial, excuses, and then the walk outside where local police are waiting to arrest them. Over its run the series catches more than two hundred men this way, and the show intercuts these encounters with interviews explaining how the sting operations are built and defending them against later criticism about entrapment and journalistic ethics. It is unpolished true-crime television rather than a single crafted film, but the tactic, the confrontations, and the arrests it documents made it one of the most watched and most argued-about news formats of its decade.