Teens' MySpace Prank Leads To Arrest

A group of boys who posed as a 15-year-old girl for an Internet prank ended up helping California police arrest a 48-year-old man who tried to meet the fictitious teenager for sex, authorities said.

The five boys had created a fake profile of a girl on MySpace.com — a social networking Web site — to cheer up a friend who had recently broken up with his girlfriend. Soon after, a man began sending messages to the "girl" and their conversations began to have sexual overtones, said Fontana police Sgt. William Megenney.

The man also sent the "girl" his picture and arranged to meet her at a public park in Fontana, 65 miles east of Los Angeles. The boys went to the park and, when the man arrived, they called police.

"He admits to detectives he was going to go up there, meet this 15-year-old girl and have sex," Megenney said.

Michael Ramos, 48, of Fontana, was booked into West Valley Detention Center on Monday for investigation of felony attempted lewd and lascivious conduct with a child and for an outstanding warrant, Megenney said. He was being held at the West Valley Detention Center on $105,000 bail, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Web site.

The California arrest is the fourth case in two weeks involving the extremely popular MySpace site.

On March 3, the FBI arrested two men in what prosecutors said were the first federal sexual assault charges involving MySpace. The unrelated cases involved Connecticut girls who were 11 and 14, the FBI said.

And, in February, a middle school student in Costa Mesa, Calif., allegedly threatened a female classmate on MySpace. The posting asked "Who here in the (group name) wants to take a shotgun and blast her in the head over a thousand times?" The student who allegedly posted the message is facing suspension from the school. Twenty other students in the Internet group were suspended from school for viewing the Web page, school officials said.

Authorities nationwide have expressed concern that the popular site puts children at risk for abuse, but the CEO of MySpace said the site remains safe. He encouraged parents to teach children the same commonsense rules on the Internet that they learn in the real world.

"If you go to the mall and start talking to strange people, bad things can happen," Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of the site, said in a telephone interview. "You've got to take the same precautions on the Internet."

DeWolfe said MySpace gets lots of attention because it has so many members, but he said the site simply offers a clearinghouse of tools already widely used online: personalized home pages, instant messaging, e-mail, Web logging and video sharing.

People who put themselves at risk on MySpace, DeWolfe said, would be doing so elsewhere.

"This isn't a MySpace issue," he said. "It's an Internet issue."

Parents are accustomed to teaching their children how to stay safe and DeWolfe said that needs to extend to the Internet. He said MySpace offers a list of safety recommendations.

"Don't post anything you wouldn't want the world to know. On the Internet, people aren't always who they say they are," he said. "If you keep some of those safety tips in mind, the Internet can be a pretty safe place."

Children younger than 14 aren't allowed on MySpace and 14-year-olds are allowed only restricted access. DeWolfe said the site uses a computer program that analyzes user profiles and flags members likely to be under 14. More than 200,000 users have been deleted, he said.

But children regularly lie about their age to get around those restrictions.

DeWolfe said company officials have assisted on more than 2,400 investigations, from criminal cases to runaways, and make themselves available to investigators around the clock.

"We think MySpace is a great place for all users over 14," he said.