COEUR d’ALENE — Last week, a 55-year-old St. Maries man was confronted at the Ironwood Plaza in Coeur d’Alene by a slim, scruffy-looking truck driver with a cellphone camera.

The truck driver, 28-year-old Coeur d’Alene resident and Post Falls High grad, Jesse Weeks, asked the St. Maries man if he had been texting a 15-year-old girl in an effort to have sex with the minor.

Coeur d’Alene Police were notified and arrived at the scene to interview the St. Maries resident, and the sexting case is under investigation by both the Coeur d’Alene Police Department and the Benewah County Sheriff’s Office.

Weeks isn’t an angered uncle or father of the teenager who engaged the older man.

But, he is the man behind the set up.

A little more than a month ago, Weeks and a group of friends and acquaintances joined in an effort to find adults who engage teenagers on dating apps, in an attempt to groom them for sex.

His Facebook group, called Hunted and Confronted, is true to its name.

Since going online, July 8, Weeks and the seven-member team that includes “decoys,” who act as teens, turned more than 18 cases over to police departments from Washington to Colorado and the East Coast.

The confrontation with the St. Maries man occured Aug. 3.

Coeur d’Alene Police would not comment on the case other than to say that a detective has been assigned to investigate.

No arrests have been made.

Weeks said his group isn’t a bunch of untethered vigilantes looking for would-be sex offenders to entrap.

“We do everything the right way,” he said.

And they don’t think police are doing a poor job weeding out sexual predators.

He and group members launched Hunted and Confronted because they wanted to support their communities and help children.

“We’re just tax-paying Americans doing something good for the community,” he said.

Dana, 24, (who used an alias for this article) one of the group’s “decoys,” lives near the Tri-Cities. She uses several dating apps to start conversations in areas where Jesse is traveling.

Within minutes of logging on with a comment such as, “Hi, I’m Dana in Coeur d’Alene, anyone want to hang out,” older adults, usually men, will engage her. Conversations may last hours or days. Ages and photographs — many explicit — are exchanged.

“We only post headshots, but we get a lot of unwanted genital pictures,” Weeks said. “A lot.”

Eventually, if an older man wants to meet, a time and date is agreed upon and Weeks shows up with his iPhone to record the interaction.

“He goes to the location, and he contacts them,” Dana said. “We never confront them.”

The older men try to groom the decoys, and the decoys play along, Dana said.

“They start the sex talk. I act like a shy teenager,” she said. “We’re pretty much catfishing.”

Dana was the decoy used when Colorado sex offender Travis Joe Benson was arrested in Greeley, Colo., in July. The parolee fell into the trap set for him by Dana and Weeks.

The group was inspired by other similar groups working in other areas including in Florida and the U.K., Weeks said. He initially got the idea from a Dateline episode.

Not all the cases result in arrests, and some of them go haywire.

In Oregon, where Weeks said police do not work with him, a man they had targeted attempted to run Weeks over with his car, Weeks said.

“The police didn’t show up,” he said.

Mostly, police do show up.

Members of the local International Crimes Against Children unit, which investigates child sex cases in Idaho wouldn’t comment for this article, but voiced concern for Weeks.

The 28-year-old brushes off the concerns. He has had his own rubs with the law — including a burglary conviction in Kootenai County for selling an iPad at a pawnshop that he appealed and lost.

He said he puts the safety of children over his own well-being.

“A lot of these guys are self-consumed in pity and shame,” he said. “They are taking the innocence of children and feeding their own sorrows.”

Dana said she uses a lot of different dating apps, and urges parents to monitor their children’s activities on everything from cellphones to gaming.

Volunteering as a decoy for Hunted and Confronted has given her new insight into how predators work, she said.

“Anything with a chat log,” she said. “They need to be monitored by parents.”