It started out as a different way to find people who weren’t living up to their promises, now it’s no more.

The Department of Children and Families used to have a website that showed child support evaders pictures. It launched in April of last year.

Ardith Smith-Woertz is a family law attorney at Joseph, Hollander & Craft in Topeka. She said if a person is behind on their payments, they need a good reason.

“They have to come in and talk to a judge and explain why they’re not paying,” said Smith-Woertz.

It used to be easy to identify child support evaders on the department’s website. It showed the pictures of each parent behind on their child support by more than $5,000 and where they were last seen.

Now if you try and go to the website, it just has an error message.

The website was taken down about a week ago. Officials said not very many people used the page. 

“DCF is using a number of other methods on a daily basis to track down child support evaders. However, it is important that efforts are strategic and not made public in order to prevent evaders from learn(ing) our tactics,” said Ashley All, spokeswoman for Governor Laura Kelly.

Even without the website, if you know a person that’s not paying for their child, DCF would like to know.

“If the other parent is not paying, they could give information to the enforcement agency about hey, I know where he or she lives and I know that they just got a job,” said Smith-Woertz.

The website did help catch one or two evaders days after it was launched, but a department official said he believes there weren’t more cases like that.