Topeka ? A three-day sting operation focusing on Internet chatrooms netted seven arrests of men trying to meet underage girls for sex, authorities said.

Instead of finding 13- and 14-year-old girls at a house in south Topeka, the men instead met police officers and Shawnee County sheriff’s deputies.

The Police Department and Sheriff’s Department conducted the sting Aug. 9-11 with the help of USCyberwatch.com, a Longmont, Colo.-based nonprofit group that targets online sexual predators.

An eighth man was arrested on a weapons charge after accompanying one of the other men to the home.

Sheriff Richard Barta confirmed the arrests on Wednesday.

Sheriff’s Capt. Scott Holladay declined to give specific details of the sting.

But Nikki Delaney, co-owner and operator of the USCyberwatch.com Web site, said profiles and photographs of nonexistent 13- and 14-year-old Topeka girls were placed online. Authorities got “tons” of hits from chatters in Kansas regional rooms, Delaney said.

Delaney and her husband, Jay – also a co-owner of the site – and another volunteer posed as the young girls, chatting on computers at the house where the sting took place.

“They’re still sending hits to those profiles,” Nikki Delaney said Wednesday.

During the sting, she said, men would contact the “girls,” initiate discussions about sex, and set up meetings at the house to perform specific sex acts. Officers monitored the chats, while others conducted video surveillance from another bedroom.

Other officers monitored the men from unmarked cars as they drove to the house, and confiscated their computers after the arrests.

Nikki Delaney, 37, said she talked with each of the men by phone before they arrived, disguising her voice to sound younger and recording each call. Once the men got to the house, they were arrested.

“We were working 18 to 20 hours a day,” she said.

USCyberwatch.com investigations have led to 28 convictions, including one earlier this year of a Topeka man. Eric Binns, 26, was convicted Feb. 2 of attempted aggravated indecent solicitation of a child younger than 14. Court testimony indicated that he believed he was chatting with a 13-year-old girl, but was instead communicating with Nikki Delaney.

He was placed on 18 months probation.

“Hopefully, this will keep people from preying on Topeka kids,” Delaney said of the latest sting.