Category Archive for : ‘INTERNET OFFENDER CASES’

Four families have sued News Corp. and its MySpace social-networking site after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site.  A 14 year old upstate New York girl went on MySpace last year looking for new friends, but she ended up being raped by two young men who stalked the site looking for easy prey.  She was raped twice in one night went she went to a home to meet her new friends, two men aged 19 and 18 who had claimed to be younger.

Advocates in favor of strict surveillance of sexual predators voiced their concerns Wednesday as Suffolk lawmakers plan to build a free countywide wireless Internet network.  Laura Ahearn, of Parents for Megan’s Law, believes a free Wi-Fi system will enable child predators to act without accountability.  Unlike Internet service from a home or business, Ahearn says police would be unable to trace people using the service with illegal intentions.

(Glen Cove, New York)

Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy has been touting a plan to provide free or affordable wireless fidelity, or WiFi, service to county residents so they can access the Internet anytime, anywhere.  But the problem with the proposal, some advocates and law enforcement officials say, is that it makes it easier for child sex offenders to download or distribute child pornography or sexually solicit children online, without being traced.     We have great concern because these sexual predators use IP [Internet protocol] addresses to go completely unnoticed, said Laura Ahearn, executive director

Increasingly, MySpace is a place for unfriendly attacks from digital miscreants on the Prowl, luring users to sexually explicit Web sites, clogging mailboxes with spam messages and playing on the trust users have when speaking to friends to obtain passwords that could lead to identity theft.  The bad guys are taking advantage of the same MySpace communication tools used to add friends or chat to send spam, and in some cases to send porn and offers to meet teens and minors.

(Los Angeles, California)

Over the past several months, MySpace.com has been hammered by media reports, portraying it as both a safe haven for sexual predators and a dangerous place for naive teens who post personal, and potentially damaging, information for all the world to see.  In response, the Rupert Murdoch-owned company has boosted its security and public relations efforts.  

All but one of the offenders Wired News found on MySpace appear to have been convicted of engaging in some kind of sexual activity with a minor.  The other, one of the two

Federal officials announced yesterday that a nationwide probe into child pornography trafficking using Internet file-sharing networks has resulted in 1,000 investigations and at least 65 arrests. Charges against the 65 people arrested have included possession and distribution of child pornography and sexual abuse of children. The 1,000 investigations have involved more than 350 searches of computers and other property.

(Washington)