MySpace Scams

 A 25-year-old man charged with luring a 15-year-old girl over the Internet and then sexually assaulting her was released yesterday after posting $75,000 bail.

Kalani Trujillo was charged with two counts each of first-degree sexual assault and third-degree sexual assault. Trujillo posted bail yesterday and was released from custody, the city prosecutor’s office said.
Trujillo and the girl met on the MySpace.com Web site and struck up a friendship. On July 10, Trujillo picked up the girl near her home and took her to his Salt Lake home, according to an affidavit filed in Honolulu District Court.

Once at his home, the two went into Trujillo’s bedroom and began to kiss, the affidavit said. Trujillo then asked the girl to remove her clothes, which she did, and the two had sex, the affidavit said.
In Hawai’i, it is a criminal offense for anyone to have sex with minors younger than 16 if the accused is more than five years older than the minor and is not married to the minor. In Trujillo’s case, he knew that the girl was 15, the affidavit said.

The girl reported the incident to police and identified Trujillo to police from a photographic lineup, the affidavit said.
On July 28, police with a search warrant went to Trujillo’s home and arrested him. Police said they also seized an unregistered handgun, but he has yet to be charged with that offense, the prosecutor’s office said.

The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed the Deleting Online Predators Act, which would require public schools and libraries to block student access to commercial social-networking sites such as MySpace.com.

The measure passed 410-15 on July 26.

DOPA would require public schools and libraries receiving federal funds for Internet access to provide a “technology protection measure” for minors to protect them from harmful material on the Internet, including child pornography, material that is obscene or harmful to minors, or “commercial social networking website(s) or chat room(s) unless used for an educational purpose with adult supervision.”

As applied to libraries, the measure provides that the “technology protection measure” must protect “against access by minors without parental authorization to a commercial social networking website or chat room, and informs parents that sexual predators can use these websites and chatrooms to prey on children.”

According to the factual findings in the bill, sexual predators often “approach minors on the Internet using chat rooms and social networking websites” and that “one in five children has been approached sexually on the Internet.”

“I am extremely pleased that the House moved so quickly to pass this important legislation,” said the measure’s chief sponsor, Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., in a press release. “This legislation is the first of its kind to address the growing use of social networking sites by sexual predators. Passage of the “Deleting Online Predators Act” demonstrates Congress’ commitment to safeguarding America’s families.”

Not everyone supports the proposed legislation. The American Library Association expressed disappointment July 26 at the House action.

“This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students’ ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs,” said ALA president Leslie Burger in a news release.

“Under DOPA, people who use library and school computers as their primary conduits to the Internet will be unfairly blocked from accessing some of the web’s most powerful emerging technologies and learning applications,” Burger said. “As libraries are already required to block content that is “harmful to minors” under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA is redundant and unnecessary legislation.”

Mark Uncapher, senior vice president and counsel for the Information Technology Association of America, also expressed opposition to DOPA.

“We have concerns that the legislation moved quickly without thorough committee review, particularly given existing law such as the Children’s Internet Protection Act,” Uncapher said.

CIPA, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld from First Amendment challenge in United States v. American Library Association (2003), requires public schools and libraries to adopt an Internet safety policy that protects minors from online obscenity, child pornography and other material harmful to minors.

ITAA’s position is that DOPA provides less flexibility than CIPA and is redundant.

“We are concerned that DOPA would micromanage schools and libraries (in their) management of their E-Rate funded systems,” Uncapher added. E-Rate is a federal program that makes some technologies more affordable for eligible schools and libraries.

The question now is whether a similar measure will be introduced for similarly quick passage in the Senate. Jeff Urbanchuk, Fitzpatrick’s press secretary, said House supporters were waiting for a companion bill to be introduced in the Senate. “We do think it will happen,” he said.

MySpace is experiencing technical difficulties which have forced the social networking site off the internet.

The site has been offline since 2:40am on 24 July. A message posted on the site blames the outage on a power cut at its data centre.

“We are in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. Hopefully we’ll be back online within the hour,” the message says. “It’s 6:40pm PST now. Wanna place a bet?” it asks.

MySpace has 95 million members and accounted for 4.5 per cent of all US internet visits in the first week of July, according to figures from web monitoring firm Hitwise.
The news about the site being down spread quickly among bloggers.

“It is hard to believe that a service this large could just have one data centre. Have they not heard of redundancy? I am pretty sure there is more to the story. One can only imagine how millions of MySpace users feel right now,” Om Malik wrote at GigaOM.

Another user on Live Journal expressed dismay that the site was unavailable. “If Tom [Anderson, founder of MySpace] was here, I’d deck him in the face. This has turned out to be one of the worst days of my life.”

To hijack someone’s photograph…

“My pictures my friends”

Meaning a devious web master can quickly become your impostor.

“I never thought it would happen to an average normal girl like me.”

Katie got a call from a friend who stumbled across a stranger’s Myspace page… But who she saw was no stranger… It was Katie… Someone had stolen her photos and started using them as their own.

“I nearly feel over that that was my main picture and they were using it as their main picture.”

“You just can’t believe it that someone has gone that far to do something like that.”

Katie’s brother Tim started to investigate and what he found is nothing short of disturbing…

Grant: “you’re big brother, what did you think?”

“It was just really shocking i couldn’t believe it. It’s my sister and next thing you know some guy, I know it was a guy was using her pictures.”

“I think it was a guy they way the profile was made it just doesn’t seem like a girl would put it together.”

They believe the impostor was actually trying to lure in other young men… With the help of MySpaceScams.com ; Myspace quickly shut the bogus site down. Leaving Katie issuing a warning about the new face of identity theft.

“Just be careful you never know who is going to go after your pictures or you or your identity.”

Fifteen years ago, Stephanie Lovatos’ two-year-old daughter, Celina Aquirie, disappeared with Celina’s father.Lovatos says she never stopped searching for Celina, but it wasn’t until late last month that she found her, through a popular teen Web site, MySpace.com.

The site is frequently in the news as a place where child predators try to find victims, but the case of Lovatos and Celina is very different.

The two had an emotional reunion Friday night at San Francisco International Airport.

“It’s been an amazing time for me,” Celina told The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen Wednesday. “I never thought this day would happen, and it’s just wonderful to be sitting next to her right now.”

Earlier, Lovatos told CBS News, “The clock couldn’t move fast enough,” in the airport, as she awaited Celina’s arrival. “I was going toward the gate, looking, watching the clock. They were the longest minutes of my life. Then, I started feeling the reaction. … ‘Oh, my God.’ I was never so terrified. I was hyperventilating. I was a wreck.”

Lovatos gave birth to Celina in Maui, Hawaii in May of 1989. She had shared custody with her boyfriend, but left him for a new life in California in 1991, taking Celina with her.

When Lovatos couldn’t find a home she considered suitable for her and the toddler, she asked the boyfriend in Maui to care for Celina temporarily.

The boyfriend and his new wife left Maui, without telling Lovatos. It turned out that they moved to Florida, and told Celina the boyfriend’s wife was her mother.

It was only when Celina stumbled on her birth certificate when she was 13 that she learned the truth.

All that time, says Lovatos, she was desperately trying to find her daughter.
“Back then, obviously, there was no Internet or anything like that,” she told Chen. “So, I first tried to get legal advice, and that’s when I was notified that neither of us had actual legal custody of her and, because of that, there was nothing (police) could do. I was just told that my best bet was just to find them on my own, and then I could, you know, obviously, try for my custody then.”

She never married, had three other children, earned a master’s degree in business, bought a home in San Jose, Calif., and is a project manager for a construction company.

Then, out of the blue, a brainstorm hit Lovatos: Why not use MySpace?

She had someone create a page for her in February and, in the area asking whom she’d like to meet, she put Celina’s name, saying: “If you ever see this, I have not seen you since you were two. I have been looking for you all this time. Get a hold of me. I have important information to tell you.”

On June 14, Lovatos got a call from a long-lost cousin, which made Lovatos realize she could access the MySpace search functionality.

Within minutes, Lovatos had found Celina’s page.

“I kept thinking,” Lovatos says, “twenty minutes on a … Web site, after 15 years of phone calls and searching,” is what it took.

Ironically, Celina says she doesn’t go on MySpace, and her boyfriend had created the page for her.

It took some phone calls and the intervention of that boyfriend and Lovatos’ best friend to finally hook them up but, when it happened, 15 years of anxiety came to an end.

“I said Celina, ‘This is Mom,” Lovatos recalls. “I started to choke up, and said, ‘Look, hear me out, don’t hang up. I just you need to know, I never abandoned you. You were taken from me, no one has ever let me know where you are. The past 15 years, I’ve never given up. I’ve looked for you. I love you and miss you.”

Celina says she’s note sure whether she’ll stay in California with Lovatos or return to Florida and her father.

MySpace.com is planning new restrictions on how adults may contact its younger users in response to growing concerns about the safety of teenagers who frequent the popular online social networking site.

The site already prohibits kids 13 and under from setting up accounts and displays only partial profiles for those registered as 14- or 15-years-old unless the person viewing the profile is already on the teen’s list of friends.

Under the changes, announced Wednesday and taking effect next week, MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old’s friends’ list unless they already know either the youth’s e-mail address or full name.

Any user will still be able to get a partial profile of younger users by searching for other attributes, such as display name. The difference is that currently, adults can then request to be added to a youth’s list to view the full profile; that option will disappear for adults registered as 18 and over. 

The partial profiles display gender, age and city. Full profiles describe hobbies, schools and any other personal details a user may provide.

But MySpace doesn’t check the truth in the profiles.

“A 12-year-old who uses MySpace told me on Friday you can always tell if someone’s older than they say they are because the first thing they ask you is your bra size,” Parry Aftab, executive director of Wiredsafety.org, said on CBS News’ The Early Show

Aftab told co-anchor Hannah Storm MySpace isn’t making enough of an effort to protect children online.

“I’m holding a summit in White Plains, N.Y., today where everybody but MySpace is coming to sit down and figure out what the we can all do, Parents, Xanga, Facebook, Bebo, [other online sites catering to teens], all of the other sites are sitting in a room with regulators and the FTC and everyone else to see what we can do to keep kids safer,” Aftab said.

Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace has grown astronomically since its launch in January 2004 and is now second in the United States among all Web sites by total page views, behind only Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. The site currently has some 87 million users, about a quarter registered as minors, according to the company.

At MySpace, which was bought last year by News Corp. for $580 million, users can expand their circles of friends by exploiting existing connections, rather than meeting randomly or by keyword matches alone.

It offers a mix of features — message boards, games, Web journals — designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages.

MySpace has recently become a target of parents, schools and law enforcement officials concerned that teens who hang out at MySpace can fall victim to sexual predators.

“MySpace has been under enormous pressure for months and the pressure is growing now that it’s being sued for by 14-year-old who was allegedly sexually assaulted by an adult who misrepresented his age,” says Magid.

The girl, in the suit filed this week, is seeking $30 million in damages. And earlier this month, a 16-year-old girl who tricked her parents into getting her a passport flew to the Mideast to be with a 20-year-old man she met through MySpace. U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded the teen to turn around and go home.

MySpace officials say the new restrictions have been long planned and are unrelated to recent events.

Besides the contact restrictions, all users — not just those 14 and 15 — will have the option to make only partial profiles available to those not already on their friends list.

All users also will get an option to prevent contact from people outside their age group. Currently, they may only choose to require that a person know their e-mail or last name first; that will remain an option to those 16 and over, even as it becomes mandatory for those younger.

MySpace also will beef up its ad-targeting technology, so that it can avoid displaying gambling and other adult-themed sites on minors’ profile pages and target special public-service announcements to them.

The changes follow a number of safety-related measures that includes the hiring of a former federal prosecutor and Microsoft Corp. executive as its online safety chief. MySpace already has developed safety tips for parents and children and devotes scores of employees to monitoring the site around the clock.

Children’s safety online shouldn’t be left solely to services like MySpace, says Aftab, who offered tips earlier this year on The Early Show.

“Parents have to be involved. Ask their kids if they have a MySpace or other social networking page, tell them you want to look at it tomorrow, giving them a chance to clean it up,” Aftab told Storm Wednesday. “If your kids aren’t listening to you, and you’ve set rules that you like, it’s time to unplug the computer.”

“I need somebody to be the parent in the house.”

In the 3 1/2 years this column has run, Mike Sullivan is the first person to be profiled twice.

When I wrote about him three years ago, Sullivan was the detective in charge of the Naperville Police Department’s Internet crimes unit. Today, he helps run the high-tech crimes bureau for the Illinois attorney general’s office, concentrating 100 percent of his time on Internet child exploitation.

This means that every day, Sullivan works on these horrors: “Child pornography, solicitation for sex, performing sexual acts with a child, videotaping or engaging a child to videotape himself during sex,” he listed. “Also, harassment, stalking and cyber-bullying.”

In three years, the technology sexual predators have at their disposal has advanced dramatically.

Community sites like MySpace.com, Xenga.com and Tagged.com are popular among kids and serve as a detailed menu for predators.

“It’s not anonymous chat anymore like it was three years ago,” Sullivan explained. “These sites have documentation of maybe a year of a child’s life. There are pictures, hobbies, likes and dislikes.”

Also, the price of hardware commonly used for child exploitation has plummeted.

“Three years ago, Web cameras cost $100, today they’re $10,” he said about the small, stationary video cameras that connect to PCs. “Camera-enabled cell phones weren’t around three years ago. Digital cameras cost a lot more.”

Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan compares today’s technology with an even earlier era:

“When I was growing up, you always had Officer Friendly come talking about Stranger Danger and the guy that was going to flash you in the park,” Madigan recalled. “Now all these predators are on the Internet. Kids are being abducted. Kids are being raped. Technology has allowed criminals to do unthinkable things.”

Thankfully, the technology used capture these criminals has progressed equally dramatically.

Consider the story of Taylor March, who ran a day-care center in her Minonk, Ill., home.

Last year, March boasted in a Yahoo chat room that she was going to broadcast herself molesting a toddler through her Web camera. There were six children in her home at the time.

An Ohio police officer was in the chat room. From the offender’s Internet protocol address, he knew she was in Illinois. The officer called Sullivan’s office.

“Within 10-15 minutes, we were able to ID her and actually capture an image of the woman via her own Web cam,” Sullivan said. “We then sent it to the Minonk police chief.”

Total time elapsed between Taylor’s boast and police walking into her house: a couple of hours.

“It should have been quicker,” said Sullivan. “Unfortunately, even with us being that quick with it, she was able to molest one child.”

The fast communication between the police agencies is a result of the Internet Crimes Against Children task force, to which the Ohio officer belonged. The task force operates in 46 states.

In Illinois, 50 federal, state and local agencies are members (www.illinoisicac.org). The coordinator: Michael Sullivan.

What can parents do to keep their children safe?

“The No. 1 thing I would tell parents is that a sexual predator’s strongest weapon online is secrecy,” said Sullivan. “And a parents’ strongest weapon against sexual predators is communication.”

There’s a “grooming” that takes place when a predator prepares a child for exploitation.

“It’s the same grooming sex predators have used for decades. What they want to do is create a friendship with a child.” And, with it, the secrecy.

“He’ll say things like, `This is our secret. You can trust me. You don’t tell anyone. I won’t tell anyone.’”

The best thing parents can do, Sullivan said, is a decidedly low-tech activity: talk to your kids.

“Sit down with them. Let them show you how they search. Ask them what sites they have created. But keep in mind while you’re doing this: do not overreact. The worst thing you can do is put it into their minds that you’re going to be mad at them, punish them, or you’re going to take the computer away.”

Also, look at what they use for their screen name. See if they’re using their home address. “Explain to them how this might be harmful,” Sullivan said.

And if the kids insist on privacy and refuse to share the information?

“Kids aren’t as slick as they think they are,” Sullivan replied seriously.

“Search the community sites for them yourself. So if you search for `Emily’ on MySpace, you might not find your daughter. But if you search for 14-year-olds in the junior high your daughter currently attends, you may find her. Kids tend to list their school and their home town on these sites.”

Also, you can check their instant-messaging programs, which usually open with the user name already entered. Sullivan finds that kids usually use the same screen name on IM applications as they do on community Web sites.

Another trick: Go to MySpace and start by typing a single letter in the log-in name field. If your child uses the site, the Web browser will auto-complete the name, which you can then search for.

Finally, check out your own computer’s hard drive: Look for temporary Internet files and, especially, cookies. All of the popular social networking sites use cookies.

In addition to open communication, Madigan plans to use a low-tech approach when her 17-month-old daughter is of “Internet age.”

“We’re going to keep the computer that has Internet access in a public part of the house,” Madigan said. “It will be where I and my husband are walking around. Almost 100 percent of the kids that get into trouble have Internet access in their room behind a closed door.”

She added: “It’s OK to have a computer in their bedroom. Just not a computer connected to the Internet.”

Which makes centuries-old, common sense parenting techniques the best preventative measures against high-tech crimes against children.