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After the publication of this review, we have been in correspondence with SOYFIP regarding the issues mentioned in the review that shed light of suspicion on the organization. However, SOYFIP has furnished proof that they indeed work with law enforcement in order to nab suspected pedophiles. Therefore, we believe that we can state with confidence that SOYFIP is NOT a scam, as they seem to genuinely work towards the cause of catching pedophiles.
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Saving Our Youth From Internet Pedophiles (SOYFIP) is an organization which claims to be creating a database of internet pedophiles. It seems to be a vigilante group with no affiliation to any law enforcement authority. The members of SOYFIP pose as minors online to catch pedophiles. The majority of the website traffic comes from USA and UK.
At the time of writing this article, there are 808 individuals included in their list of ‘captured pedophiles’. SOYFIP has published the names, photographs, chats logs and other redacted information of these individuals to serve as a reference. The idea is that anyone who suspects a person around them to be a pedophile can check SOYFIP’s website to confirm their suspicions. The details given on the website seem to be genuine as there is no evidence of the images or chat logs being copied from elsewhere.
Official Domain
soyfip.org
Registered on
2014-08-21
Owner
Unknown
Only the information about the domain name and registration date is available as other details have been protected by a privacy guard.
Email ID
Not Provided
Phone Number
Not Provided
Address
Not Provided
The only way to get in touch with SOYFIP is through their Live Chat Support System. SOYFIP has stated that they do not share any contact details to prevent their members from being traced.
Facebook (Created on 3 February 2018): https://www.facebook.com/SOYFIP/
Twitter (Created on August 2015): https://twitter.com/soyfip
The justification given for not providing contact details is believable. There are no official social media profiles of SOYFIP listed on the website but some profiles were found on searching the websites directly. The social media pages are not active and only seem to have been created to prevent the name SOYFIP from being used by anyone else.
Scamadviser Verification
SOYFIP.org has been verified by Scamadviser as having a valid company registration and/or ID.
On every page of the website, a pop-up appears after loading which states that any voice calls from SOYFIP should be ignored, as they never call anyone and threaten to publish personal information outside the website.
This suggests that there are scammers making phone calls to people pretending to be representatives of SOYFIP. The possible scam here could be that imposters are calling people up pretending to be SOYFIP with an intention to extort money. There is, of course, the possibility that SOYFIP might be threatening people about posting their names and photographs on the website, but there is no evidence that they are involved in such unscrupulous activities.
Suddenly receiving a call and being accused to pedophilia would no doubt scare anyone. No information could be found about such a scam as there is almost no information available about SOYFIP outside their website. Given the sensitive nature of the topic, people who have received such calls might be reluctant to post about it online.
Scamadviser’s algorithms have given SOYFIP a high Trust Score of 100%, indicating that users need not worry about using this website. You can learn more about SOYFIP’s Trust score here.
There is only one user review for SOYFIP posted on Scamadviser. The user has thanked them for saving the reviewer from a ‘sick pedophile’ and contains a link to the website. The account has only posted one review on Scamadviser and there is a possibility that this review could be fake due to reasons which are explained in the next section.
You can read the user review here.
Reviews of SOYFIP are scarce. However, a number of reviews were found on the Web of Trust page of SOYFIP. This page has been claimed by the organization and they have replied to the reviews.
The WOT reviews are all positive and have awarded SOYFIP between 4.5 to 5 stars. These reviews seem to be fake due to three main reasons.
The first reason is that there is a suspicious pattern of two reviews being posted on the same day after long gaps.
The second reason is that the profiles seem to be created for the sole purpose of leaving reviews for SOYFIP. The accounts are likely to be fake as the images used as the profile pictures can be found on other websites. Some of these websites contain the names of the people pictured and they don’t match the names used in the Web of Trust accounts.
The third reason is that the reviews don’t look like ones that real users would leave. All of them seem to be trying to present various ‘use cases’ of the website and 7 out of 11 reviews contain the link to the website. Real reviewers rarely include website links in their reviews. One of the reviewers has said that she visits the website every day to check if anyone she knows has been captured. It’s a really weird thing to say about a pedophile database, in my opinion.
To learn more about how you can spot fake reviews, visit the page How to Recognize Fake Reviews.
SOYFIP has a low likelihood of being a scam.
The website has an outdated design which can be attributed to the fact that it was created in 2014. The organization seems to be self-funded and is not soliciting donations on the website or on social media. They have prominently put up an alert on the website that they do not call up people or publicly release personal information. The suspicious WOT reviews might warrant a lowering of their Trust Score, but there is no evidence that the organization or the website pose any risks to ordinary internet users.
Though there is no evidence that SOYFIP itself is running an extortion racket, it seems that impersonators are trying to blackmail people by branding them as pedophiles. These kinds of scams are known as ‘extortion scams’ and there have been many instances of people falling victim to these. To know how you can protect yourself from extortion scams, visit the page How to Recognize a Scam - Extortion Scams.
Dating scams are also a fairly common occurrence on the internet. Scammers pretend to have fallen in love with victims and ask for money under false pretences. To learn more about Dating/Romance Scams, visit the page Dating & Romance Scams.
Follow our social media channels for news about the latest scams and tips to stay safe online. We also invite you to join the growing community of scam fighters on our Facebook Group.
