The phone call to his father came from a stranger, but the accusation against 25-year-old Akash Singhania was very public. The Dallas entrepreneur flew to Los Angeles for work, then used the hookup app Pure to meet a woman in Santa Ana—only to walk into a livestreamed “CATCHING CHILD PREDATORS!” sting led by internet provocateur Vitaly Zdorovetskiy on the Kick platform. Per a deep dive by Kashmir Hill and Aric Toler, writing for the New York Times, the woman was a paid decoy, with Zdorovetskiy’s team claiming Singhania thought she was 16. On camera, Zdorovetskiy flung racist taunts at him as more than 24,000 viewers watched, doxxed Singhania in real time, and even messaged his family. Police arrived, cuffed Singhania, posed for pics with Zdorovetskiy, and then quietly released Singhania, later telling his father he’d simply been in “the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Singhania insists the decoy never told him she was underage and says the supposed incriminating Snapchat message wasn’t from his account. Afterward, Zdorovetskiy apologized on X, admitted his team “mistakenly portrayed” Singhania as a predator, and tried to scrub the clips. But Kick’s paid “clippers,” who peruse longer streams and pull out shorter segments they think will grab people’s attention, had already pushed the video everywhere, turning a false accusation into viral content. Things soon turned for Zdorovetskiy himself: Kick briefly suspended him. He’s now back to streaming, though, as well as gambling with online casino Stake and planning more “predator” hunts. Singhania is weighing legal action and says he’s now wary of dating apps, and of strangers in general. “I don’t really trust anyone,” he notes. “You never know who anyone could be.” More here.
