Facebook & a sex scam

It was the first time Facebook has been accused of being used by a sexual predator to contact a minor, its chief security officer Chris Kelly told the Chicago Tribune. Last week in suburban Chicago, "authorities arrested a [23-year-old] man who they say used Facebook to pose as a teenage girl in an elaborate scheme to lure a 15-year-old boy from Evanston to his home for sex." The Tribune says Facebook believes the man "may have circumvented safeguards by "hijacking" a female high school student's profile last year (by obtaining her user name and password), using it to trick the boy into believing he was going to meet a peer. The 16 million-member service "is made up of 47,000 networks - individual schools, companies or regions - that are each independent and closed to non-affiliated users," the Trib reports. Kelly was quoted in this article and in CNET's coverage of his appearance at the RSA conference: "There's going to be crime in any large community, offline and online. But you can put up lights in parks to prevent criminal activity." A lot of social sites are working on those park lights right now. [Here's an alternate link for the Trib story at PopMatters.com.]