There's plenty of precedent where police officers pretend to be an underage person and some shmuck replies to them and agrees to meet at a hotel. Then they get

There's plenty of precedent where police officers pretend to be an underage person and some shmuck replies to them and agrees to meet at a hotel. Then they get arrested, and much of the time they also get prosecuted and convicted. You could argue it's entrapment but the fact is that most of society supports that sort of preemptive law enforcement. If you looked at it through a purely ethical framework then you could never convict the person because there was never any "real victim." But is that the right way to look at it? It's certainly not the way most people look at it.