MySpace Scams

A Jacksonville, FL man says he was duped and robbed by two girls after attempting to meet with a woman he met on the internet. The victim says he chatted online with a woman, known on her MySpace.com profile as “Natalia”, for two weeks before deciding to meet with her. He says her prfile showed sexy photos, and a blurb which said “just lookin’ for something fun”. That brief, friendly description was all he knew about her before they planned to meet.

PALMDALE, Calif. — Postings on the popular Web site Myspace.com have led the parents of a missing Illinois girl and a private investigator to believe that she may be in Southern California. 

Jessica Liccar, 16, of Crete, Ill., has been missing since June 2 when she crashed the family car. 

The girl was taken to a hospital but released before her parents arrived and hasn’t been seen since. 

Liccar’s parents believe she is traveling with 17-year-old Simon Sotheras, and postings on the social networking site revealed information that the pair may be in the Palmdale-Lancaster, Calif., area. 

Liccar is 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 140 pounds. She has reddish-brown hair and braces. Her possible companion is 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs 170 pounds. 

Anyone with information is asked to call 800-487-0947, ext. 9.

A 16-year-old girl from Detroit, who tricked her parents into getting her a passport and then flew to the Mideast to be with a man she met on MySpace.com has returned to Michigan.

U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded Katherine R. Lester to turn around and go home before she reached the West Bank. Lester arrived at Bishop International Airport in Flint late Friday and was taken to a private area to be reunited with her family.

She disappeared Monday after talking her parents into getting her a passport by saying she was going to Canada with friends, sheriff’s officials said.

She apparently planned to visit a man whose MySpace account describes him as a 25-year-old from Jericho, Undersheriff James Jashinske said.

MySpace.com is a social networking Web site with more than 72 million members that lets users post photos, blogs and journals. It is owned by the same parent company, News Corp., that owns FOX News. There have been scattered accounts of sexual predators targeting minors they met through the site.

Lester apparently contacted the man from Jericho about three months ago, Jashinske said. Jericho, a city of 17,000, is a relatively calm area of the volatile West Bank.

The FBI traced the teenager to a Wednesday flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Tel Aviv, Israel. At a scheduled stop in Amman, Jordan, U.S. officials persuaded her to return home, FBI agent Robert Beeckman said.

“Thank God she was returned safely,” Lester’s father said Friday afternoon while awaiting her arrival.

Terry Lester said his daughter is a straight-A student and student council member. “She’s a good girl. Never had a problem with her,” he said.

MySpace forbids youngsters 13 and under from joining and provides special protections for those 14 and 15 — only people on their list of friends can view their profiles. Older users also have the option of restricting certain personal data so it can be seen only by people they have identified as friends.

Shawn Lester told The Saginaw News that her daughter has “never given me a day’s trouble. … I just don’t understand with all these new laws protecting America how a 16-year-old kid could get out of the country.” She said her daughter never had a boyfriend and seemed to be content with that.

Katherine and her mother live in Gilford, a village about 80 miles north of Detroit in Michigan’s agricultural Thumb region. Her father lives in Grand Blanc Township.

Jashinske said deputies confiscated the family’s home computer and were taking it to the FBI’s Bay City office for analysis. He said it remained unclear whether any laws had been violated because of Lester’s age. The age of sexual consent in Michigan is 16; Katherine turns 17 on June 21.

“I’ll be honest with you, we don’t know if a crime’s been committed,” Jashinske said.

The Grand Forks School District has blocked the popular MySpace.com Web site on its computers, citing safety concerns and negative behavior nationwide linked to the site, including bullying and stalking.

“Outside of our schools, adults posing as youth have gained access to student chat rooms, which has led to tragedy in some cases,” said an April letter to parents signed by Ron Gruwell, assistant superintendent for secondary education, and Jody Thompson, assistant superintendent for elementary education, for the Grand Forks schools.

“Unsuspecting students have posted enough personal information that predators are able to locate their home or school address, thus becoming easy targets for predators.”

The Web site has become a favorite of child predators, cyber bullies and con artists, the letter said. Also, children, mostly ages 9 to 14, use the anonymity of the Web to post messages about others that would not be said face-to-face, the letter said. It went on to urge parents to talk to their children about MySpace, and to go to the site and register.

“Parents should be aware of what their children are writing and what others are posting on their Web sites,” the letter said.

MELBOURNE, Fla. — A picture on a MySpace website brought police to the door of a Melbourne family’s apartment and now it could put that family out on the street. The pictures of a 14-year-old with two BB guns tucked into his shorts prompted a neighbor to call police and the landlord.

Now, because of the pictures, the teenager’s family has been given seven days to get out of their apartment at Sable Palms.

Nico Portis’ mom knew he had a MySpace page and knew he had a BB gun, a gift from his aunt. But, she didn’t know the combination of the two could cause so much trouble.

Nico said he spends about four hours a day on MySpace. It was his space on the popular website that may ultimately cost his family their home. A picture of him with two BB guns tucked into his waistband and another picture of an arsenal of weapons were the final straw for the managers of the Sable Palms Apartment.

When another resident saw it, Portis’ family was given seven days to get out. His mother was astounded.

“Never ever, never in my life. I never would imagine that a MySpace page would even go to that extreme, never,” said Kecia Williams, Nico’s mother.

The manager of the complex was not permitted to discuss the case on camera, but said there were numerous other violations of the lease, including a guest of her son’s who was arrested for burglarizing another apartment. The manager said the MySpace photos were just the last straw.

Williams said her son was unfairly targeted.

“Every time there is, like, an incident, it’s basically like your son did this or your son did that,” she said.

She also said no one in her home has been arrested and when the police came out to investigate the pictures on the MySpace website, they found nothing illegal. The picture of the arsenal had been pulled off another website.

“Anybody can put anything they want on MySpace. Why was he targeted? That’s what I want to know,” Williams said.

Williams is already challenging the termination of the lease. The manager said if she does and loses, it could be much harder for her family to find another home.

Williams said she forced her son to take the pictures off of his websites and when the police were there she asked them to confiscate the BB gun, which they did. They are waiting to see what will happen with their apartment next.

Southridge High School officials suspended six students Tuesday in connection with threats on the MySpace Web site.

The online activity, which started with an electronic posting attacking Goth students at the school, led to an exchange of violent threats.

On Tuesday, police officers who patrolled the school reported no violence, said Maureen Wheeler, Beaverton School District spokeswoman. However, Wheeler said, more students may be suspended as Southridge leaders continue to investigate.

Tuesday’s suspensions fall under the district’s broad harassment and disruptive behavior policy, which kicks in when an action disrupts learning.

School officials learned last week that one student had started an online forum attacking the Goth students, a group recognizable by their dark clothing and, at times, heavy makeup.

MySpace, an online network for young adults, allows members to create personal Web pages, host blogs and open discussion groups.

The forum turned into a hostile online exchange as more students logged on, said Randy Kayfes, the district’s public safety director. The back-and-forth fueled rumors that one group planned to retaliate against the other Tuesday, 06-06-06. The number 666 is often associated with biblical warnings of the Apocalypse.

“The rumors morphed and changed, and eventually it got so you couldn’t tell who said what,” Kayfes said.

Police and school officials were unable to identify a specific threat but beefed up security anyway. Beaverton police stationed two uniformed officers at the Southridge campus all day. Nearby Conestoga Middle School officials also warned parents of the concerns.

Some parents kept their children home. The district received a flood of phone calls about the rumors, Kayfes said. Southridge officials recorded 250 absences Tuesday, slightly more than average.

Wheeler said district computers block access to MySpace, which has been at the center of conflicts at schools across the country.

“Students can still get on at home,” Wheeler said of the Web site. “We have no control over it.”

Microsoft plans to give its MSN Spaces blog publishing and hosting service new social networking features, as well as support for the company’s lightweight applications called Gadgets.

The new social networking features are being tested by MSN Spaces users in Australia and the Netherlands, and are designed to foster user interaction, says Karin Muskopf, MSN product manager.

“We’ve heard from our customers they want to be able to see who their friends are talking to, because they feel those people would have similar interests to theirs. They want to be connected to people who are like-minded,” she says.

She declined to comment specifically about social networking competitors, but News’s MySpace has revolutionised this market with its eye-popping popularity. Beloved by teenagers and young adults, MySpace ranks second only to Yahoo in page views in the US, and drew almost 5% of all web site visits in March, ahead even of mighty Google, which drew little over 4%, according to Hitwise. MySpace currently has more than 73 million registered users worldwide, and adds about 250,000 new ones every day.

MySpace’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed by large providers of online services such as Microsoft, AOL, Google and Yahoo. Google has an invitation-only social network called Orkut and Yahoo has a blogging service called Yahoo 360. AOL recently launched AOL Pages, a social networking service tied to its AIM instant messaging service.

Ironically, MSN Spaces may also end up competing with Wallop, a startup that is developing a social networking service with technology Microsoft spun off from its research unit. Wallop plans to launch its service this year.

MSN Spaces, launched in December 2004, has always allowed users to link to other blogs on the network. But the plan now is to make this easier to do and more attractive, by letting users add a section to their blogs where they can build a gallery of “friends” who also have MSN Spaces blogs.

While this functionality is now limited to a simple hyperlink, entries in this new gallery will contain much more information about the friends, even including notes and tags the user can add about them. The social networking features will also be integrated with Microsoft’s instant message service.

The tests in Australia and the Netherlands have been going well and Microsoft plans to extend this functionality to users in other countries in the coming months, Muskopf says.

It makes sense for Microsoft to try to leverage the sizable MSN Spaces audience to go deeper into social networking. About 40 million people have set up MSN Spaces blogs, and the network receives about 120 million unique users per month, she says. Around 6 million photos are uploaded to the service each day for a total so far of about 2.5 billion.

Meanwhile, MSN Spaces will also gain support for Microsoft’s Gadgets, the lightweight applications introduced last year as a way to extend the functionality of larger desktop and web-based applications. Microsoft provides a website where developers can find information on how to build these mini-applications. Muskopf declined to provide details on how Gadgets will be supported within MSN Spaces.

MySpace.com is described as an Internet site devoted to social networking. Any rational adult who’s spent more than a few minutes on MySpace might well conclude that it, like much of cyberspace, appeals to the lowest common denominator. I won’t bore - or repulse - you with specifics. Let’s just say that you probably wouldn’t feel comfortable with your mother, unless mumsie is Madonna, visiting many MySpace pages.

Tasteless photos and cartoons and deviant thoughts litter the website. Catchphrases rule. Banal ideas are expressed in crude English.

There are folks, often women, seen in shopping malls carrying on lengthy cell phone conversations. You might ask, as I have, is there really another person on the other end of that long, mind-numbing conversation? Hearing snippets of chatter along the lines of “I just had a taco, I like tacos, do you like tacos?, what are you eating?,” I’ve sometimes wondered where in the world the callers find anyone willing to put up with such extended blather.

Now I think I know. My guess is that they get their phone buddies on MySpace. There are some very lonely people there.
Obviously, MySpace isn’t my place. But some adults might find what they’re looking for there, and that’s their business. Unless, of course, if what they’re looking for is a child to molest.

The biggest problem is that MySpace, which claims to be “a place for friends,” has become a playground for sexual predators. To register, a user only has to be at least 14 years of age. That restriction is easily ignored. There have been numerous reports of crimes and attempted crimes against children in which the site has played a role.

MySpace may be a victim of its own success. With a reported user base in the tens of millions and a quarter of a million people signing up daily, the three-year old site may not have been prepared for the abuses it’s experienced.

In April, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Advertising Council, and News Corporation, which owns MySpace, started running public service advertisements intended to raise awareness of Internet safety. In May, a law targeting “social networks” and Internet chat rooms was proposed in Congress. The legislation would block access to those sites in federally funded schools and libraries.

Many schools have already decided on their own to limit access on their computers. In a move that was guaranteed to fan the flames of teen outrage, a school district in Illinois recently took action to hold students accountable for what they post on websites such as MySpace. Actions like that are usually condemned as censorship. To which the appropriate response may well be, so what? Children don’t have the same rights as adults. And acting goofy online at taxpayer expense isn’t constitutionally protected, no matter what the ACLU may claim.

On the other hand, regulating access to social networking sites is much easier said than done. One need not have the technological prowess of Internet inventor Al Gore to circumvent many blocking measures. Add to that the government’s general clumsiness in securing whatever results it intends and there realistically isn’t much reason to think that legislation will have a great impact.

If there’s going to be anything close to a resolution of the problems inherent to MySpace and similar sites, it’ll have to be initiated by parents. Knowing where children go on the Internet, what they do there, and with whom they communicate are essential. There is monitoring software that can help.

Kids might scream about their privacy being violated, but families aren’t democracies. They’re dictatorships and part of a parent’s responsibility is to protect their children as best they can for as long as they can.

Last month a reporter wrote in the Los Angeles Times that she’d covered many disquieting events in her career, “But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on MySpace.com.”

MySpace isn’t for everyone. We can only hope enough parents realize that in time.