Sex Predators Lurk On Facebook Too

Potential victims are not aware who they are pen pals with and who is hiding behind innocent photos of their peers.

Apart from being useful, popular social networking site Facebook can be a dangerous mask for sex offenders. In short time, Facebook has become very popular social website, with nearly 200 million people using it throughout the world.

Of course, this includes the unique opportunity of various weirdoes contacting their potential victims.

They are not aware who they are pen pals with and who is hiding behind the interesting and pleasant profile. This is why it is no wonder that over 10,000 persons who have one or another sexual offence have been found on Facebook, especially if we take into account the total umber of users and the benefits of anonymity these websites offer, Intimate Medicine writes.

Fight for children`s safety

A man named Richard Blumenthal has started a campaign of searching for disputable Facebook users and gave a statement for the media, saying this is a struggle in which children need to be protected, because they fall for words of kindness. Just imagine someone contacting your minor daughter, claiming to be her peer, uploading fake photos, convincing her to send him her own. He becomes her secret friends and asks for a real life meeting.

And now a creepy comparison: MySpace, a site similar to Facebook, has found 90,000 disputable users in the past two years, which is a terrifying number.

How were they found?

Both websites have introduced stricter and more precise registry terms, according to which every new user must prove their age in several ways. At the same time, they have introduced a few tricks which try to disable older users from extensive searches of minors.

Chris Kelly, head of Facebook security, told the media how they found the sex offenders. He said they had several methods and used the testimonies of users who have submitted their disputable comments.

Of course, also with the help of the national sex delinquency registry, as the offenders were highly incautious, starting an online hunt for their new victims. Today, Internet is controlled to such extent that such a person can be found faster then in the real world.

A profile with a real name

Kelly added that Facebook is slowly requesting new users having to sign up under their real name and actual information, which would enable better access to information from their past.

Thus, Facebook could create a list of disputable names which would not be allowed access of an account. However, what happens when such a person accesses the system from a different IP address, under a different name?