Wacky Internet Predator Wednesday – Issue 32
The reason I enjoy writing these posts so much is because so many so-called and self-proclaimed experts and pundits really honestly think the predator threat is overblown. Yet every week more and more scumbags are arrested (or convicted) for trying to lure and solicit kids online. And I don’t mean soliciting them to play Monopoly… they are after them for sex.
But some people just either don’t want to believe it – or don’t think it’s a problem. Well, I do. And now, once again, here are 8 more reasons you should be using PC Pandora computer monitoring software to make sure your kids are safe when they surf online:
- A 42-year-old Michigan man and an 18-year-old New York man were arrested thanks to the efforts of a Virginia cop who works online undercover. The two men tried to solicit what they thought was a 13-year-old boy and sent child pornography to the officer. The 18-year-old admitted to sexually molesting three juveniles in the Montezuma, NY area. Oh wow. So these guys DO exist and they DO hurt real kids too…. Hmmmm…
- An 18-year-old male student from Milwaukee is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts. Yeah, so ummm, real kids were involved with this one. Guess there isn’t still a problem though, right?
- A 22-year-old Massachusetts man was convicted on charges of enticing a child under 16, attempt to commit a crime and dissemination of matter harmful to a minor; he was sentenced to a prison term of 2 – 3 years followed by 5 years probation. In 2006 he drove to a meeting spot with plans to have sex with who he thought was a 13-year-old girl.
- Three California men have been arrested and charged with the horrific gang rape of an 18-year-old girl one of the men met on MySpace. While the girl was over 18, making this less of a case of monitoring, it shows that hey, guess what, there are predators on MySpace after all that DO want to harm and rape you.
- A 31-year-old Georgia man was arrested after he drove 3 hours to have sex with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl. ‘Nuff said.
Here are the detailed stories and their links. But please, people, realize there is a threat here and that this is a real situation. Don’t play games with your child’s safety. Make sure they are safe when they go online. And there is no better way to make sure they are safe then knowing what they are doing online. With PC Pandora computer monitoring software you CAN know what they do, where they are going and who they are talking to. Everything else is just a guess.
February 2, 2009
Small town officer stings Internet predators
By Uriah A. Kiser, Stafford County SunFrom his laptop computer in Dumfries, Officer John Chapman has helped to arrest some of the country’s most dangerous child sex offenders.
Posing as a 13-year-old boy, the Dumfries police officer chats with older men from places like South Carolina, Georgia, Quebec and as far away as Hawaii and London, who ask him to send photos of his fictitious persona.
Chapman just added two more names to his list of arrests — Peter L. Montgomery, 42, of Farmington Hills, Mich., and Steven Valder, 18, of Montezuma, N.Y.
Montgomery is accused of sending hundreds of images of child pornography to Chapman between Aug. 30 and Jan. 28.
Chapman said Montgomery asked the fictitious boy to invite friends over to his house to produce additional child pornography.
On Friday, the Michigan State Police searched Montgomery’s home while he was away and seized his computer, Chapman said. Police later tracked him to another house in Michigan and arrested him.
Montgomery is already listed on Michigan’s State Police Sex Offender Web site for a 1994 California conviction for lewd acts with a 14-year-old child, Chapman said.
In the second case, Valder first contacted Chapman on Nov. 2 from his home in Cayuga County, N.Y.
Again posing as a 13-year-old boy, Chapman said Valder sent him multiple images of child pornography, and admitted to having previous sexual relationships with minors.
Once he found an address for Valder, Chapman said he contacted the Cayuga County Sheriff’s Office and started building a case against him.
On Jan. 8, the Cayuga County Sheriff’s Office said they received a complaint about Valder from another child.
Working from information from that victim and the Dumfries Police Department, the Cayuga Cayuga sheriff’s department searched Valder’s home and found more than 1,000 images of child porn on his computer, according to Chapman.
After the search Valder admitted to sending the photos to Chapman, and to sexually molesting three juveniles in the Montezuma, N.Y. area, according to police reports.
For a small department with just 14 officers, Dumfries police officers are doing big things when it comes to catching Internet predators.
Between regular patrols, court dates and extraditing the men charged in sex offenses, Chapman chases Internet predators in his spare time.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has recognized him for his work.
“When you get ’em locked up there is no better feeling in the world, especially when you are helping poor victims. There is no better high than that. I think that is what drives me; knowing that the bad guy is going to get locked up and somewhere some little kid is going to be saved,” said Chapman.
The officer said it isn’t hard to catch a predator.
He simply logs into a Yahoo chat room — usually having to do with a video game — posing as a 13-year-old boy.
He said it doesn’t take long for an predator to start talking to him, and propositioning him for “cyber sex.”
“Their main goal is to get the kid on cam, when he does he can get still photos of the kid,” he said.
Part of why he is so dedicated to his work is because he has children of his own.
“It takes a certain type of person to do what John is doing. I could not do it; I could not sit there and deal with this type of person on the other end of the computer who is doing stuff or involved with little kids,” said Dumfries Police Chief Calvin Johnson.
Johnson said Internet crimes have been on the rise for a decade, and he hopes the state will make more money available to advance the search for online predators.
In the meantime, Chapman said parents can help to protect their children by not allowing them to have access to the Internet in their bedrooms, and by knowing who they talk to online.
As for the most recently charged; Montgomery is awaiting extradition to Virginia, where he faces 30 counts of child pornography distribution and one count of attempted indecent liberties with a child.
Valder has been charged with criminal sexual act in the first degree. He is being held on a $20,000 bond.
February 5, 2009
Teen accused of sex assaults in Facebook scam
By Carrie Antlfinger, APMILWAUKEE (AP) — An 18-year-old male student is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts.
“The kind of manipulation that occurred here is really sinister in my estimation,” Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel said Wednesday.
The students go to New Berlin Eisenhower High School in New Berlin, which is in Waukesha County about 15 miles west of Milwaukee.
Anthony Stancl, of New Berlin, was charged Wednesday with five counts of child enticement, two counts of second-degree sexual assault of a child, two counts of third-degree sexual assault, possession of child pornography, repeated sexual assault of the same child, and making a bomb threat.
Stancl’s attorney, Craig Kuhary, said Stancl plans to plead not guilty to the charges and hopes to reach a plea agreement with the district attorney
“It’s too early in the case for me to make a statement, other than the fact at some point we are going to go into events that had taken place earlier that might have had some impact on what he did here,” he said. He wouldn’t go into specifics.
The incidents allegedly happened from spring 2007 through November, when officers questioned Stancl about a bomb threat he allegedly sent to teachers and wrote about on a school’s bathroom wall. It resulted in the closing of New Berlin Eisenhower Middle and High School.
According to the criminal complaint, Stancl first contacted the students through the social networking site Facebook, pretending to be a girl named Kayla or Emily.
The boys reported that they were tricked into sending nude photos or videos of themselves, the complaint said.
Thirty-one victims were identified and interviewed and more than half said the girl with whom they thought they were communicating tried to get them to meet with a male friend to let him perform sex acts on them.
They were told that if they didn’t, she would send the nude photos or movies to their friends and post them on the Internet, according to the complaint. Stancl allegedly used the excuse to get the victims to perform repeated acts, the complaint said.
Seven boys were identified in the complaint by their initials as either having to allegedly perform sex acts on Stancl or Stancl on them. The complaint said Stancl took photos with his cell phone of the encounters.
Officers found about 300 nude images of juvenile males on his computer, according to the complaint. Prosecutors said the victims were as young as 15.
A preliminary hearing for Stancl has been scheduled for Feb. 26. The maximum penalty if convicted on all charges is nearly 300 years in prison.
BROCKTON — A Norton man who drove to Hanover with plans to have sex with who he thought was a 13-year-old girl will spend at least two years in prison.
Michael Buswell, 22, of Norton was convicted this week of enticing a child under 16, attempt to commit a crime and dissemination of matter harmful to a minor. Superior Court Judge Richard Chin sentenced Buswell to a prison term of two to three years followed by five years probation.
Buswell was arrested in 2006 in a store parking lot on Route 53 in Hanover by state police and members of the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department High-Tech Evidence Analysis team, or HEAT.
He was arrested as part of a sting operation targeting online predators.
A deputy sheriff posed as a 13-year-old girl and began chatting with the suspect online. After two online chats, the suspect made arrangements to meet what he thought was a teenage girl.
VISTA —- Two North County men accused in an “horrific” gang rape of a teenage woman nine months ago pleaded not guilty Friday to a host of charges that could land them in prison for life.
A third man has been arrested and charges were filed against him Friday, but San Diego County prosecutors are trying to extradite him from Arizona, where he was arrested in connection with the North County case earlier this week. At least one more man is under investigation and may be arrested and charged, Deputy District Attorney Dan Rodriguez said.
The prosecutor said the 18-year-old victim was raped at numerous locations during the hourslong assault, then dumped nearly nude in a San Marcos industrial park.
Wearing not much more than a dirty towel found at the business, she had to walk barefoot for a mile to find help, he said.
Defendants Brian Shippee and Robert Melgoza face charges including forced rape, sodomy and oral copulation.
The third defendant, Victor Barnett, is charged with one count of forced oral copulation, as well as an accessory in the rapes.
All three men are charged with kidnapping with the intent to rape, which carries a potential sentence of life in prison. Barnett and Shippee are 21 years old, Melgoza is 20.
The prosecutor said the victim had just met Barnett the day before via the social networking Web site MySpace, and agreed to attend a party with him.
Both she and Barnett were students at a Palomar College, according to court documents, but had not met face to face before the night of the assault.
Shippee and Melgoza listened in a Vista courtroom as Rodriguez asked that they not be allowed to post bail, given what he called the “horrific nature” of the attack on the woman.
Superior Court Judge Marshall Hockett ordered that Shippee and Melgoza be held without bail during the case.
The alleged attack happened in mid-May 2008, but the accused men were not arrested until Wednesday.
Rodriguez said the delay in arresting the men came for “several reasons,” including the need to run DNA testing.
“Forensic findings support her story,” Rodriguez said, “and physical evidence both at the industrial area and at Shippee’s house support her version of the events.”
The prosecutor also said investigators had toiled to find other suspects and witnesses in the case.
“The concern was that we weren’t going to get everybody if we moved too soon,” Rodriguez said. “Plus, Vincent Barnett disappeared at some point, and it took some time to locate him in Arizona.”
Barnett and Shippee met up with the victim at Palomar College, bought brandy and headed off to an industrial park to drink. Afterward, they headed to Shippee’s home, the prosecutor said, and continued to drink while in a camper belonging to Shippee’s neighbor.
There, Shippee raped the teen, and both men forced her to orally copulate them, he said.
Melgoza showed up, the prosecutor said, and Shippee and Melgoza then raped the victim in the back of Shippee’s car in the driveway of his home.
They all then went to a nearby industrial park, where Melgoza and Shippee each assaulted her again on a loading dock, he said. Afterward, she tried to leave, but was snatched back, and assaulted a final time by Shippee and Melgoza, Rodriguez said.
The men left. The victim, wearing only a T-shirt and a towel or sheet the defendants found at the scene, walked to the first lit place she could find —- a gas station —- and asked that someone call the police.
ALBANY, GA (WALB) – Dougherty County Sheriff’s investigators arrested a man they say drove three hours to Albany to have sex with an underage girl.
The man thought he was chatting online with a 14-year old girl.
He made a date to come from Atlanta to meet her.
Turns out he was actually chatting with a group called Perverted Justice that tracks online predators for law enforcers.
31 year old Sivakumar Jeraraman is in the Dougherty County Jail on $5,000 bond, after he was arrested in an Internet Sting operation.
Perverted Justice intercepted on-line messages from the Atlanta computer programmer, starting January 11th, making him believe he was chatting on MySpace with a 14 year old girl.
Captain Craig Dodd said “She had already told him repeatedly during their conversations that she was in middle school, and she was 14 years old. He continued the conversation and became much more sexually explicit as the conversations went on.”
Lt. Anita Allen, who will head the Sheriff’s new Internet Child Crime’s Division, said Friday Jeraraman set up a meeting for Saturday.
Lt. Anita Allen said “The defendant, Sivakumar, made the reservation at a local motel for 2-07-09. The defendant drove from Atlanta Georgia to Albany 2-07-09, and arrived at a local motel at 4:45 hours, to meet with the 14 year old female.”
But it was Sheriff’s Investigators who waiting on him, and arrested him.
Dodd said “When he opened the door when we knocked and he saw a rather large law enforcement officer instead of a 14 year old girl, he looked like he was rather shocked.”
Jeraraman is an Indian national in the United States on a work visa. He was working as a computer programmer, has a Master’s Degree and a wife and young daughter back in India. Sheriff Sproul is having his Department join ICAC, the Internet Crimes against Children crime network, to fight sexual predators.
Sproul said “It scares me to know there is so much of it out there Jim. People don’t realize there are hundreds or thousands of people on line every moment trying to abduct your child.”
Investigators say there is no doubt Jeraraman would have been a danger if a 14 year old child had met him, and that is why Sheriff Sproul is beefing up his Department to battle Internet Sexual Predators.
Federal authorities have been contacted about Jeraraman’s felony arrest.
Sheriff Sproul says he’ll likely be deported with no chance to return to the United States.
December 22nd, 2009 at 12:49 PM
[...] like to do updates on past stories. This one is an update on one of my Wacky Internet Predator Wednesday – Issue 32. Remember the 18-year-old male student from Milwaukee accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, [...]