How one hacker mom is keeping children safe from online criminals

Sixty-five percent of online sexual offenders used social networking sites to learn details about their victims

April 3, 2014 2:15PM ET

by Abigail Leonard

Daniel Spagnoletti doesn’t scare easily.

On a recent afternoon, the father of three sped his new motorcycle nearly 200 mph down a Phoenix freeway just to see how fast it could go.

But he chokes up when he describes what he calls the most frightening experience of his life: the night he found his 15-year-old daughter Shelbi’s iPad open to an explicit conversation with an older man.

"It turned from 'Hey, how are you doing?' to sexual favors back and forth," he said. "At that point I couldn't see straight; the tablet was melting from the fire coming out of my eyes."

Daniel Spagnoletti

America Tonight

Shelbi and a friend met the stranger on the social networking site MeetMe.com and accepted his invitation to go swimming at a nearby apartment complex. Spagnoletti feared the unthinkable.

"What’s worse than raising a child for 15 years and then in one second knowing you'll never see her again?"

He raced to the complex, lights flashing to attract attention of police. When he arrived – trailed by a phalanx of officers – he found Shelbi scared but unharmed. She said her friend convinced her to come along and she hadn’t realized she was in any danger until her father arrived.

"After the fact, thinking about it, he could have easily, easily just locked us in his car and driven God knows where," she said.

The man fled, but other children had not been so fortunate.

Predators have used MeetMe in numerous sexual assault cases across the country: In June, a Massachusetts man pled guilty to charges he used the site to trick teenage girls into sending him naked photos then blackmailed them into sex. And last year in California, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and New Mexico, MeetMe users were charged with raping girls as young as 12, while users in other states were charged with soliciting teens for sex.

The site now has 90 million users, a quarter of them under the age of 18. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera called it "an app of choice for sexual predators and criminals to track young people."

His office is now suing MeetMe under California’s unfair competition law, seeking to force the company to change its consent policies.

He said children sign up and unwittingly divulge their personal information and geolocation data – in other words, their real-time location. "Individuals above the age of 18 sign up and say they're between the ages of 13 and 17 with no age verification or verification that they're not sexual predators, and can immediately gain access to the profiles of young people."

MeetMe declined an interview but said in a statement, “We review hundreds of thousands of photos posted to our services every day and we compare that to a sex offender registry.”

Still, it’s easy to provide false information. America Tonight created an account using an anonymous email address, set the profile to 13-year-old boy, added a picture of Mickey Mouse – and we were in.

Research shows predators are becoming increasingly Web savvy. Sixty-five percent of online sexual offenders used social networking sites to learn details about their victims, including home and school addresses, according to a 2010 study by the Journal of Adolescent Health. More than a quarter used the victim’s social websites to determine their exact geolocation.

Nico Sell, a computer hacker and organizer of Defcon, one of the world’s largest hacker conventions, said these sites have made kidnapping and stealing kids' identities "tremendously easy."

Nico Sell

America Tonight

Three years ago, she founded a children’s conference at Defcon called R00tz, where she shows kids how vulnerable they are online by teaching them to hack.

"We do things like, 'let me show you how to eavesdrop on someone's cell phone calls and text messages. Let me show you how to break into [Facebook] and [Twitter.] Let me show you how to turn on the interfacing camera," she explained. "The kind of data we can buy on other people."

Sell doesn’t apologize for teaching children to hack private communications. "You can't make kids behave well online by saying privacy is good for you. They will run from it. What you say is, ‘You want me to show you how stupid these other people are for being online? Look at how easily I could own them.'"

She recommends children – and adults – take precautions to protect their privacy. She keeps her cell phone in an impenetrable metal case so hackers can’t access her GPS location or messages. She also keeps a sticker over her phone’s camera unless she’s using it.

She warns that unless the phone’s battery is out, criminals can still get in.

"The NSA is just the tip of the iceberg; surveillance has gone mainstream. This is the kind of thing we can teach the kids how to do in a half an hour."

As for her own kids, Sell isn’t taking any chances. She’s already taught her 4-year-old daughter to use Wickr, an app she created that sends encrypted, self-destructing messages. It now has roughly 1 million users.

She says such apps are necessary because regulators simply can’t keep up with all the sites criminals and predators are using.

“None of the lawmakers can grasp this all, so I deploy an attitude of download very, very few apps and check them out and check out the founders and how they make money very closely before I let my kids use anything.”