TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Category: Social Media Crime

  • Louisiana MySpace sting

    Santa’s Helpers child predator operation:

    This is a story about an internet sting that took place recently in Louisiana.

    In Acadia Myspace.com helped the Acadia parish sheriff’s department and the Attorney General’s office take alleged child predators off the street.

    Christopher Patton, Mark Whitney, Troy Kimble, and Robert Brenneman were arrested during the sting, which involved setting up fake Myspace profiles of underage girls to which the suspects allegedly responded and set up meetings.

    “There are a number of statutes that play. The person who exposes himself on his webcam has violated the law. The person who arranges to meet a child for sex is breaking the law. The person who asks for child porn has violated the law. The typical has violated all three.

    And it just wouldn’t be Christmas without the MySpace profiles of at least some of the suspects.

    I was able to find the MySpaces of Patton, Kimble, and Brenneman.

    Thanks to Kirk M. for the tip.

  • Brandon Bigsby: sex offender and parole violator

    MySpace.com Used To Track Sex Offender:

    Registered sex offender Brandon Bigsby, 24, must have really been addicted to MySpace considering he broke basically all of his parole conditions to use it…

    On Thursday, officers were dispatched to Taft College, where they found Bigsby’s GPS tracking device. He was believed to have left an hour previously to the deputies’ arrival. Deputies tracked Bigsby to the Beale Library in downtown Bakersfield, where he accessed a MySpace forum. Officials arrived and found Bigsby, where he was arrested.

    Bigsby pleaded guilty to one count of a lewd and lascivious with a child under 14 years of age in May 2003, according to Superior Court records. He was sentenced to three years at Wasco State Prison and required to register as a sex offender. He is listed on the Megan’s Law Web site.

    If parole violations aren’t enough to keep pedophiles off of MySpace I don’t see how any legislation could either.

    I was unable to find a MySpace for Bigsby.

  • More on Viriginia’s proposed MySpace legislation

    False promises on MySpace safety:

    I’m kind of relieved that I’m not the only person that thinks Virginia’s proposed MySpace legislation is pointless…

    Flummoxed by bad press, the folks at MySpace.com are scrambling to derail the perception that they’ve become the preferred dating service of pedophiles.

    The first arrow in their anti-Cupid’s quiver is to enact state and federal laws requiring that convicted sex offenders register their e-mail addresses just as they already must register their physical one. Armed with the new database, MySpace and other sites will be able to bar the cyber-gates against perverts.

    On Monday, Virginia’s Attorney General Bob McDonnell announced his backing for the required legislative changes here.

    McDonnell is right to be concerned about the issue, but if his loud endorsement causes parents to ease up on supervising children’s Internet use, the effort will be worse than irrelevant. The idea is so ridiculously full of holes that any predator familiar with such obscure Internet technologies as Yahoo! and Google can get around it with a minute’s effort.

  • Va. Attorney General piles on MySpace

    Virginia Attorney General Proposes MySpace Bill:

    Another State Attorney General who doesn’t get it jumps on the MySpace scarewagon. This time from the Commonwealth of Virginia.

    Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell announced plans today for legislation to require convicted sex offenders to register their online identities with the state.

    That would allow social networking Web sites like MySpace to delete or block access. McDonnell’s says in a statement that Virginia would be the first state to propose registration of e-mail addresses and instant messaging identities on the state’s sex offender registry.

    McDonnell says it’s important these changes be made at a state level because most prosecutions of sex offenders happen at the state level. There are more than 550-thousand registered sex offenders in the United States and 13-thousand in Virginia.

    MySpace officials applauded the Virginia announcement, saying the Internet “is a community as real as any other neighborhood and is in need of similar safeguards.”

    In my opinion, this proposed legislation is just to garner votes from the equally clueless soccer mom types.

    Again I say what’s to stop the sex offenders from creating another account different from one registered with the state. And how will this prevent those predators who haven’t been caught from claiming another victim?

    When you have those questions answered then you’ll have some legislation with teeth instead of the same old crap that legislators have been trotting out.

    Politicians and lawmakers should learn how to use the internet first before they start legislating it.

    And again not one mention of more vigilant parenting.

  • Douglas Russell

    Man met alleged victim on Myspace:

    PEKIN – A Pekin man is being charged with committing criminal sex abuse three months after he is alleged to have had sex with the 14-year-old girl he met on the Internet.

    Douglas M. Russell, 18, was arrested in September for criminal sexual abuse.

    The charges were filed on Dec. 6, the same day police arrested Russell for allegedly having sex with the 14-year-old girl again.

    On Sept. 12, the Pekin Daily Times reported that Russell and the 14-year-old girl met through the popular networking Web site Myspace.com. According to police reports, the two spent hours chatting online before they finally decided to meet.

    Arrangements were made between Russell and the 14-year-old girl for him to come to her residence so he could crawl through her bedroom window, police said.

    Through their investigation, officers learned that Russell had been to another Pekin residence. Officers went to that house and spoke with a 14-year-old girl who told officers that Russell had recently left the house, Salmon said.

    The 14-year-old girl told police she heard a knock on her bedroom window, saw that it was Russell and let him into the house.

    Detective Dustin Salmon said police did not know if the two continued to communicate between the summer encounter and the most recent incident.

    Russell is charged with criminal sex abuse, a Class A misdemeanor, criminal trespass to private property, a Class 4 felony and obstructing justice, a Class 4 felony.

    I was unable to find a MySpace for Russell.

    And again I have to ask why these 18-year-olds are continually going after underage girls. Can’t you get girls your own age? If you have to tap on somebody’s bedroom window late at night you know you’re doing something wrong.

  • The overlegislation of MySpace continues

    And while we’re plugging other blogs (because you know, we were) Pat from BelchSpeak has a great post about new proposed legislation that would make it illegal for sex offenders to use fraudulent e-mails to sign up for MySpace…

    The danger in this is that the Federal government suddenly gains the power to monitor the email activity of everyone in order to enforce a law against a small portion of the population. Otherwise this law banning the use of non-registered email addresses is unenforceable. Are liberals going to be outraged over the civil rights of sex offenders being violated?

    Thank you, Charles Schumer and John McCain. Is there nothing you two won’t try to legislate?

  • More on the MySpace database

    Can MySpace Protect Its People?:

    This is basically an article from Internet News about MySpace’s declaration of their sexual offender database and how they’re going to keep sex offenders off MySpace and how that’s not going to work…

    “We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer, said in a statement. The database is a “significant step to keep our members as safe as possible.”

    MySpace said Sentinal Safe resulted from talks with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. But in a statement, Blumenthal called the new measure “ineffective without age and identity verification.

    “Convicted sexual offenders” can swiftly circumvent these protections by using fake names,” he said. The tobacco and alcohol industries already employ age and identity verification on the Internet, he added.

    Nigam said a gap will still remain in the ability to keep sex offenders off social-networking sites until legislation is passed forcing convicted offenders to use registered e-mail addresses.

    How can you force anyone to continually use the same e-mail address? That sounds like a waste of taxpayer money to me. Just because you can legislate something doesn’t make it feasible.

    The article also quotes some really smart people…

    “If predators really want to get around [the barrier] they can easily do it,” Ron Teixeira, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, said. A blog titled MyCrimeSpace.com lists news items of adults meeting children on the social-networking site.

    Well, that’s not all I do here but you get the point.

  • New Jersey calls out the usual suspects

    Keep kids’ photos off Web sites, state attorney general warns:

    The New Jersey State Attorney General thinks pictures are the problem…

    The playground isn’t the only place parents should watch over their children, state Attorney General Stuart Rabner says.

    Rabner said Web sites that let users put their picture online are unsafe and the owners of those sites should adopt a policy to make it easier for people to report harassment and crime online. He said he is mainly concerned with social networking sites, sites made up of picture profiles and descriptions of children and adult users who befriend each other and comment on each other’s pages.

    Rabner asked the chief financial officers of 10 social networking Web sites, such as Myspace, Xanga and Facebook, to consider installing a link that would appear on every page of their site, on which users could click if they felt bothered by another person.

    This link would alert not only site officials but also law enforcement officers in order to catch criminal activity, such as sexual harassment, he said.

    In a Nov. 16 letter to Web site owners, Raber expressed the need for such a policy.

    “The use of your service for illegal activity, and as a medium through which child predators identify, learn about and contact potential victims, poses a serious threat to the public safety of some of our most vulnerable citizens and creates significant risks for the positive reputation and continued operations of your business,” Rabner said.

    “I believe these goals can best be accomplished by making it easier for users to identify and report suspicious activity and illegal content, such as child pornography.”

    Yeah, that won’t cause a plethora of false alarms.

    I noticed that nowhere in his letter did Attorney General Rabner call for better parenting.

  • MySpace to block sex offenders

    MySpace tool to help block sex offenders:

    MySpace, the popular online hangout that has drawn complaints about sexual predators and other dangers to teens, said Tuesday it will develop technologies to help block convicted sex offenders.

    MySpace is partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding to build a database containing names, physical descriptions and other identifiable details on sex offenders in the United States. The News Corp. site, however, stopped short of adopting Sentinel’s technology for verifying the ages and identities of its users.

    The database, to be called Sentinel Safe, “will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form, making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said in a statement.

    This a major leap forward in the right direction in my opinion. However, I hope the database doesn’t return any false positives. Not only that but that still doesn’t do anything to prevent first time offenders.

  • Man forces teen to expose herself with threats of violence

    Cops: Teen coerced to expose herself over Web:

    BINGHAMTON, N.Y. – A 25-year-old man faces federal charges after police said he threatened a young teenage girl and coerced her into using a Web camera to take explicit images that he later posted on the online social network Myspace.com.

    Shaun Brown was arrested and arraigned Monday in federal court on charges that he coerced a minor to engage in a sexual act and that he coerced a minor over the Internet.

    Brown met the 13-year-old girl, who lives in Ohio, in an online chat room for cheerleaders, according to court documents.

    Police said he pursued her with sexually explicit instant messages and threatened to harm her and her family if she didn’t expose herself via the Web cam.

    The girl complied and didn’t tell her parents until after she found the images on Myspace.com. Brown opened an account on the social networking site in the teenager’s name and posted an image of the girl exposing herself and included her name and address, according to court documents.

    What a sick son of a bitch.

    I was unable to find a MySpace for Brown.

    Thanks to Mandy for the tip.