By Harriet Ryan

The police sought a person who claimed to be Bree Condon and who had bilked thousands out of men in an online scam. They were surprised to meet Justin Brown.

Postings over the last two years on the website Who’s Dated Who hint at the number of men who may have been scammed. After the site authors listed both actor Colin Farrell and professional basketball player Marko Jaric as dating Condon, a visitor calling himself Michael Curry wrote, “love the gossip but bree and i have been dating for months.” Others replied with warnings.

“She is bad news,” read one typical posting.

Interestingly, another user disparaging Condon identified himself as Justin Brown.

“I dated her too. Really sweet at first then it’s $5,000 a month just to be one of her boyfriends,” the posting read.

Brown remains in jail, and his court-appointed lawyer did not return calls seeking comment. Satterlee, the detective investigating the Austin case, described him as “cooperative” in an interview with police.

“He made statements that substantiated the information,” Satterlee said.

Jason Boone, a researcher at the National White Collar Crime Center who has studied Internet scams, said Condon’s case stood out as an unusual “true case of identity theft” among the more common schemes targeting bank accounts or credit card information.

“Here you are actually stealing someone’s name and likeness,” he said. As a criminal operation, it is rarer than viruses or e-mail con letters that aim to steal financial information, likely because those require less work, he said.

Impersonating someone else “takes a little more attention and a lot more motivation on the part of an individual to create this type of attractive profile to lure people in,” Boone said.

Austin police are investigating whether Brown created a fake “official” website for Condon as well as Facebook and MySpace profiles in her name. According to the arrest warrant, his days impersonating the model came to an end after he sent a message to Carbona, the Fort Myers investor.

“It opens to this picture of a beautiful woman. A damsel in distress,” Carbona said of the message he received this fall through a networking application on his iPhone. The sender claimed to be Condon and to know Carbona through a friend. She said she was in dire financial straits after an airline had lost her luggage, he recalled.

After several phone conversations, however, Carbona concluded, “I think I have someone who is full of baloney.” He tracked down the real Condon on a film shoot in Wales and said she told him it was a long-standing problem and referred him to her private investigator. Carbona, whose father and grandfather were police officers, said he cooked up a sting operation to pinpoint the fake Condon’s location by offering to pay her motel bill.

He passed the address to the private investigator who notified authorities. He was stunned when the person arrested was male.

“I’d been talking to this person for three months,” Carbona said. “I’m telling you this guy has either had his gonads removed or he is talking through a voice synthesizer.”

“He has a very feminine voice,” Satterlee, the case detective, confirmed.

Brown’s arrest went unnoticed online, where questions about Condon’s real identity and love life linger.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

By Eliot Van Buskirk

Facebook and MySpace have terminated the accounts of 3,533 convicted sex offenders in the state of New York after they submitted their account information to the state under 2008’s Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) law, the New York Daily News reports.

The law requires the state’s 30,000 convicted sex offenders to file their home, e-mail and social networking addresses with the state. Out of that pool, only about 27 percent revealed e-mail addresses or social-networking usernames to authorities, and only 10 percent divulged a Facebook or MySpace username.

The remaining 22,000 or so registered sex offenders who did not supply online identity information are either in prison or homeless, lack computer access or simply chose not to respond, an unidentified state Division of Criminal Justice Services representative told the New York Daily News.

The e-STOP system only works if criminals volunteer their social networking identities, as they are required to do within 10 days of creating a new account under penalty of new felony charges. Proponents of the law have declared it a success.

“Before e-STOP, sexual predators freely lurked in social networking sites trolling for innocent victims,” said executive director of Parents for Megan’s Law and the Crime Victims Center Laura Ahearn to the Daily News. “With e-STOP, Attorney General Cuomo has sent a clear message that there is a new sheriff in the cyberworld protecting our most vulnerable.”

New York State supplied the account names to Facebook and MySpace over the past two months as part of the first stage of the e-STOP sweep. The next step is to check whether any of the offenders violated the terms of their early release from prison by setting up a profile on the sites.

Incidentally, sex offenders — like many others — appear to favor Facebook over MySpace. Out of the 3,533 offenders whose accounts were terminated, 79 percent were on Facebook and 51 percent were on MySpace. Many had accounts on both networks, while 21 percent used MySpace exclusively and 49 percent used Facebook exclusively.

(Update: the final paragraph of this article originally failed to distinguish between the number of social networking accounts and the number of account holders; those percentages have since been corrected.)

Source: wired.com

By Jessica Walker

Segment 4

Jessica: Please give our members examples of the information that should be withheld from a dating profile or a social networking profile, information that a criminal could use against them.

Linda: When you are first meeting and getting to know someone online you want to share what you care about, and not much about who or where you are.

Maintain anonymity to protect your identity. Don’t include your full name, phone number, where you work, financial status, or detailed location information in your profile or during early communications with potential dates. Stop communicating with anyone who presses you for this type of information.

Use the e-mail system provided by the dating service rather than your own e-mail address to maintain your privacy.

Be smart about choosing profile pictures and learn how to share photos safely. Make sure your photos reflect what you want to say about yourself. Provocative pictures may attract the wrong people. Make sure that your images do not contain identifying information.

Set your search criteria to filter out anyone with behaviors you may not want to deal with, and check to see if a potential date has a good reputation among other daters on the service.

Be cautious about sharing emotional vulnerabilities. It is very easy for criminals to play to emotions to gain undeserved trust, or to tell a sad story to gain your sympathies. Use a friend as a sanity check – if the story sounds like a stretch to them it probably is.

Note any inconsistencies in what they say about themselves. Periodically reviewing exchanges you’ve had with a critical eye is healthy. This is a real advantage with the Internet, because it IS written down, not something fuzzy in your memory.

Jessica: Safer Dates recently partnered with your company ReputationShare and added a gauge to our member profiles that track online behaviors.  How can our members get the most out of this feature?

Linda: You deserve to experience the Web, and the people you meet through the Web, on your own terms. I was super pleased to learn how much Safer Dates is dedicated to providing as safe an environment as they can, AND how much they respect their users. ReputationShare does two key things for Safer Dates users.

First, it helps the service identify and manage rogue users because, like credit bureaus, ReputationShare literally shares people’s online reputations across participating sites.  If someone has been abusing other Dating sites or their members, Safer Dates can see that information even as the person is registering and take appropriate steps. That said, unlike credit bureaus, the ReputationShare service does not receive or store any information about who the user is. Consumers privacy is extremely important to us. Users stay entirely anonymous, but both positive and negative behaviors associated with their email alias are collected. Of course, we have advanced algorithms to identify email accounts being gamed. Learn more about ReputationShare on www.reputationshare.net.

Second, it gives users the ability to make more informed choices about who they choose to interact with.

Segment four question:  Name four things you should withhold from your dating profile. To submit your answer, click on the contact link found on the upper left side of the blog.

The Advocate Staff
Posted: 06/01/2009 08:14:01 PM EDT

By Debra Friedman

STAFF WRITER

GREENWICH — When a Brazilian nanny started moving from house to house, stealing checks from her Westchester, N.Y., and Greenwich employers, and even showing up at a local day care to pick up a child after having been fired, Greenwich police put a stop to her crime spree.

But police said the criminal nanny is a prime example of how residents need to protect themselves when hiring an in-house employee, particularly one in charge of watching children.

“She bounced from job to job, and along the way she committed a crime at each stop,” said Detective Pasquale Iorfino. “When you allow someone into your house, you should know who they are.” continue reading