Fire Chief Fights Net Predators
This is a great story to post on Friday before the weekend. Basically, a fire chief knew his daughter was up to no good online (talking with strangers). So, he put monitoring software on the PC; he put a stop to the conversations; the predator was arrested; and now the fire chief talks to other parents about internet safety and this grim reality.
I’m not sure what title of software he used, but the bottom line is that this is a perfect case of why monitoring the activity of your kids online is so essential. As you read, you will see that the daughter thought nothing of talking to stranger and that she was giving out personal info without second guessing herself.
Thankfully, the fire chief was authoritative enough to take action and not remain blind. Parents, try PC Pandora monitoring software on your home computers. I will GUARANTEE you have no clue what your kids are doing online. We have never, to date, had a return because a parent saw nothing of concern in the captured activity.
Anyway, read this story… soak it in… and go here to download and try PC Pandora…
April 14, 2009
Brooklyn Park’s fire chief wants to share what he knows about protecting teenagers from predators on the Internet.
By JIM ADAMS, Star TribuneBrooklyn Park Fire Chief Ken Prillaman says a teenager’s computer is a lot like a car: You don’t hand over the keys until you teach the kid to drive.
Prillaman’s 13-year-old stepdaughter nearly crashed on an Internet ride with a shadowy character before Prillaman and his wife, Debbie, grabbed the wheel.
Their first clue came about 18 months ago when an older daughter gave them a peak at the 13-year-old’s MySpace playground. The Prillamans were stunned to see the tough, sexy Web persona she presented, and that she had 572 friends. Some of them talked about guns, money and drugs. One guy, who they dubbed Torso because of his muscular online picture, had sweet-talked her into an invitation to their home in St. Michael.
“We knew she wasn’t friends with all these people,” said Debbie Prillaman. “I wondered how she met them.”
Like a lot of parents, the couple knew little of the computer social scene or Internet predators who create flattering or flirtatious identities to lure unsuspecting children into their hands.
The threat became real about two months later when Debbie got a call from a Hennepin County deputy on the state Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
“The deputy wanted to interview our daughter about someone he thought she met at a festival in Rogers,” Debbie Prillaman said. Turns out the guy, who was e-mailing her daughter, was 17 years old and under a court order not to contact any girls under age 15, the couple said.
By then Chief Prillaman had installed monitoring software on their daughter’s computer. Digging deeper, he found she had been e-mailing another guy — Torso — who in less than a day gradually had learned where she shopped, lived and went to school. He thinks the Rogers e-mailer was a different predator than Torso.
Torso “was very manipulative and very precise in terms of how he walked down the path from complete stranger to getting an invitation over to our house,” Prillaman said.
Prillaman was so disturbed by their teenager’s near-miss that he started giving talks to families at churches and other groups about how to protect children from Internet predators. He will give another one of those talks on Thursday, at the Brooklyn Park Community Center.
Unseen enemies
“These guys are very smart and savvy,” Prillaman said. “We severely underestimated what was going on 18 months ago. It didn’t take long to figure out how overwhelmed we were.”
“Ken and I were in shock and we demanded she take her [MySpace] site down,” Debbie Prillaman added. “We were combating an enemy we could not see or touch.”
Their teen was defiant when her MySpace page was shut down, and 10 days later she opened a new account. Before her parents shut that off, she sent a last e-mail to her 572 friends. It said “call me” and gave her cell phone number.
“We took her cell away,” her mother said.
The daughter, now 15, recalled her reaction: “Rage. I was mad, mad, mad.”
After praying and talking to friends from their church, her parents found another family that had dealt with a similar Internet threat. The Prillamans created a plan to keep their daughter safe: No cell, no computer socializing, no sleepovers.
“She could go to school, dance, church and home,” her mom said. “Nothing was uncontrolled until we understood what we were dealing with. It took us eight months. Gradually we gave her privileges back … as she earned our confidence.”
But they left the monitoring software on the computer.
Their daughter, who they asked not be identified, said she came to realize some people online are dangerous. She said she emulated their tough-talking, combative attitude and it carried into her life at school where she got in trouble for swearing.
She learned when she was allowed back on MySpace, to describe herself truthfully and talk to real friends she had met in person. Looking back, her parents cracked down “to make me safe,” she said. “I am glad they caught me.”
The state’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force doesn’t have statistics on how often children are abducted by online predators, said Commander Neil Nelson. However, he said his agents posed as teenage children and went into Minnesota Internet chatrooms for six weeks in 2007. On average, someone solicited an agent for sex every 10 hours, he said. Fourteen of the solicitors were charged with felony sex crimes, he said.
Nelson advised youth to only chat online with people they have met in person. He said predators are adept at turning chats to sexual topics, a sign they are dangerous.
Three weeks ago, what the Prillamans feared, happened in Brooklyn Park.
Brooklyn Park police arrested Tony Xiong, 35, after finding a 16-year-old Milwaukee girl locked in his home’s bathroom on March 24. He faces charges of abducting and raping the teen, whom he met on the Internet.
