Texas Nabs MySpace Sex Offenders

Last month, MySpace reported that it identified, removed and blocked “a few thousand” user profiles of convicted sex offenders among its 175 million profiles on its service as part a previously announced program to protect its youth members from adult predators.

MATCHinform is encouraged that MySpace continues to increase consumer awareness and policing its popular social networking web site. As reported by The Daily Texan, MySpace is in the process of releasing the names of all convicted sex offenders in Texas who have set up online member profiles, in compliance with a May 21 order from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.

The social networking site has agreed to turn over the first and last names of users who are registered sex offenders, as well as their e-mail addresses, IP addresses and profile information.

MySpace has partnered with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., an online identity and background verification company, to create a software program to locate sex offenders with networking profiles and delete them. The program, called Sentinel Safe, aggregates information from state and federal sex offender databases into one searchable format. About 7,000 profiles have been removed from the web site so far.

As a result of the order, seven convicted sex offenders with profiles on MySpace.com have been arrested in what Texas officials said was the country's first large-scale crackdown of registered offenders who use the social networking web site.

The men were arrested in Houston, Austin, Round Rock, and Glenn Heights during a two-week operation by the Texas Attorney General's Cyber Crimes and Fugitive units. (Read full article.)