A Waterloo man allegedly planned to meet an underage girl for sex at a state park Monday night. Instead, he found investigators from a special “Internet Crimes Against Children” task force waiting. Twenty-one-year-old Matthew Wayne Woods of Waterloo was arrested and charged with enticing a minor under the age of 16.
Cops say Woods thought he was chatting on-line with a teenager, but it was really Black Hawk County Deputy Sheriff Kent Smock. “This individual, within 15 minutes, started asking inappropriate questions, started giving inappropriate images through the Internet to what he thought was a 15-year-old girl,” Smock says. Smock’s first on-line contact with Woods happened in August, and those “inappropriate images” Smock mentions were nude pictures of himself which Woods sent to what he thought was a young girl about six years younger than he is.
In the past year, Smock and a Cedar Falls policeman have spent hours on Internet chat rooms, building cases against 40 to 50 people seeking sex with minors. “A majority of the people that we talk with go about it innocently and never cross the line,” Smock says. But some, like Woods, do. Woods showed up at George Wyth State Park Monday night, expecting to meet a girl he’d been chatting up on-line. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted.