Like any website that attracts many thousands of teenagers, myspace also seems to have attracted the unwanted attention of sexual predators. On Monday, a man was arrested and charged in Fontana, California after a group of boys baited him with a fictitious profile of a 15 year old girl. The boys reportedly arranged online to meet the accused in a park and, when he arrived, they phoned the police. Last week, in unrelated incidents, the FBI arrested two adults on sexual assault charges in Conneticut.
It seems a bit unfair to single out myspace (overview of myspace from BBC News) though – the incidents described could have just as easily have happened on almost any website with social software and community features. Luckily for msypace, the good people at Fox News, owned by the same parent company, are unlikely to do their usually doom-and-gloom on this particular story.
(Update: Conspiracy theorists, and anyone who wants to know a bit more about the management team behind myspace, might be interested in this post by Trent Lapinski’s who reckons myspace is just a bit too secretive…}
self policing MySpace against sexual predators
Another sexual predator is off the streets of in Fontana, California thanks to some proactive MySpace members according to a story by Cybersoc.com
He was arrested for investigation of felony attempted lewd and lascivious conduct with a child and for an…