The tattoo was the giveaway.
The registered sex offender who had been lurking around social networking Web sites offered few details about himself and posted no pictures to his online profiles, a method of maintaining anonymity.
But he had online friends who liked to post pictures. And when the tattoo on a man in one of those pictures matched the sex offender’s tattoo in a criminal database, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place for John Cardillo, the former New York cop whose company is working with the social networking site MySpace to weed out predators.
“Criminals are impulsive; predators are impulsive,” said Cardillo, chief executive of Security Tech. “They trip up more than they think they do, if you know what to look for. And we do.”
Recently, 29,000 registered sex offenders were identified and removed from MySpace. And the Connecticut attorney general said he was looking into a few cases of convicted sex offenders setting up profiles on Facebook, another popular site.
Those on the front lines of the fight against predators on the Web, who use these sites to find young people and lure them to meet, say the battle is complex and will take a combination of education, high-tech security, old-fashioned investigative work, and cooperation among police, lawmakers, schools, parents, teens and the sites.
“This isn’t going to be something that we just solve,” said Chad Harms, an assistant professor at Iowa State University who serves on the advisory council for the Iowa Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. “This is a relatively new problem, and the light has only been shed on this issue in the last two to three years. In terms of combating this problem, this will be a continuous battle.”
Facebook, like MySpace, has tools to allow users to customize privacy settings. Facebook officials could not be reached earlier this week to comment on the investigation into sex offenders on its site or its efforts to police the site.
For months, Cardillo and his team have been comparing the various sex-offender databases with the MySpace membership list. But looking for matching names and addresses is only a small part of the work. He is also looking for missteps that might reveal more information about the criminals.
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