A wildly popular vigilante predator hunter has been busted in Florida for allegedly assaulting a suspected creep and forcing him to eat used cigarette butts.
Jay Carnicom, a father of five with more than a million followers for his videos confronting apparent child sex predators, was busted by the Clay County Sheriff’s Office in Florida last week and charged with simple battery and felony extortion, jail records show.
The arresting officer said he felt sympathy for the predator catcher’s aims — but said he took it too far, potentially also ruining chances for his prey to be prosecuted.
“If I was a citizen of Clay County and I heard that we made an arrest on somebody who’s protecting kids, I’d be upset as well,” the sheriff’s office chief of investigations, Domenic Paniccia, told News4Jax.
“But you can’t beat people, you can’t extort them, you can’t make them do things or else.”
Carnicom attempted to force a man to eat used cigarette butts while recording the encounter, telling him he would call the cops if he did not do as he said, according to an arrest warrant. But calling the cops is actually what he should have done in the first place, Paniccia said.
“The proper way to do anything is really to just call us, let us do what we get paid to do,” he cautioned. “You might think you’re helping us, but you’re hindering the case.”
Police have also questioned the motive behind the confrontational content posted by influencers like Carnicom, 32, and others, which is immensely popular online.
“I truly believe that in most of these cases, it’s done for monetary gain, for views, clicks and subscribers,” Paniccia said. “If it’s not done properly, it’s hurting us. It’s hurdles that we don’t need to cross. We would love to take these cases from the beginning and do a proper investigation.”
The sheriff’s office has its own unit investigating illegal online communications, and still reviews tips tied to videos like Carnicom’s with hundreds already probed this year, officials said.
However, they noted that adults posing as children online is not enough probable cause for police to make an arrest when the investigation was conducted by a private citizen.
“We are not in this for clicks, likes and views. We are here to hold offenders accountable and put suspects in jail,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
Carnicom, who has posted hundreds of videos confronting alleged pedophiles, has admitted that he knows his clips don’t lead to convictions, but promised to continue exposing suspected predators anyway.
“We are not in this for clicks, likes and views. We are here to hold offenders accountable and put suspects in jail,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
“If you see me smack a child predator, most of the time, I’ve already called… the police, and they told me because there was no real child or I wasn’t a law enforcement officer, they couldn’t do anything,” he said in a video posted in March, according to the Daily Mail.
“’The police aren’t gonna come convict that guy because he technically, legally didn’t do anything wrong. But we all know it’s f—king weird for a grownup to meet a 13-year-old kid off of the internet, or anywhere,” he added.
Carnicom told The Post in 2024 his desire to catch predators stemmed from his own trauma as an 11-year-old in Fremont, Ohio, where he was repeatedly molested by a family friend.
He eventually confronted him in a local Walmart in 2020 for an eight-minute encounter he posted online — with the accused abuser killing himself hours later, Carnicom said.