Syracuse (WSYR-TV) – The security of the website MySpace.com was put back in the spotlight again locally when two men allegedly met a 9-year-old girl on the website and drove to meet the child.
Solvay police say the two men, 27-year-old Brian Salisbury and 56-year-old Richard Melfi, who is a level three sex offender, believed they were meeting the little girl for sex, but it was actually her mother who arranged the meeting and called police to alert them.
Officers arrested both men when they arrived to pick up the child.
We've heard from many of you wondering how the 9-year-old was allowed on MySpace to begin with. The website’s terms of agreement specify no one under 13 can be on the site.
However, Onondaga County Assistant District Attorney Geoff Ciereck showed NewsChannel 9 it is very easy for kids to sign up and lie about their age.
“A lot of them are under 13; they say other kids in school have it or in their class and they want to see what it is like,” said Ciereck. “They go in there. They enter a date of birth that makes them 13 or older and set up an account. It's as simple as that.”
Within seconds, a pre-teen can set up an account, lie about their age, and have an account ready to upload a picture to. As easy as it is for children to lie, adults can lie as well.
MySpace does greet users with a safety message.
“I know that they try to verify people that have accounts whether they're underage but with millions of accounts, there are many that slip through,” Ciereck said.
If a teenager says they are underage, MySpace settings automatically allow only people under the age of 18-years-old to see the user’s profile. However Ciereck says that setting can easily be changed, and he says many kids do that. “What happens in schools is kids are in a race to have friends and beat the number of friends, so they set their profile to everybody,” Ciereck said.
That move makes it very easy for people who shouldn’t be looking at children’s profiles to have full access. “If you're dealing with pedophiles in particular, they target children. If you're underage and you post pictures and write things about yourself, then you're given them the roadway to exactly what they want,” Ciereck said.
Ciereck says to protect your family, ask your child if he or she is on MySpace and have the computer in a common room. He even recommends parents get a MySpace profile so even if you're not over your child's shoulder all the time, you can see what he or she is posting. Log on to MySpace with your child and set his or her profile to private to add protection.
MySpace safety rules clearly state that if their customer service department determines a user is under 13, the profile will be deleted, but as Ciereck pointed out, many of those profiles can easily fly under the radar.
