Originally posted here by Leviatan
The problem today is that kids know more about computers then their parents do, parents need to be able to monitor what the kids do and what sites they visit but it's virtually impossible, unless if you have JP as your dad or something. Holland has a lot of these cases, in fact some 23 year old programmer flew all the way to the USA to meet a 13 year old girl who happened to be an FBI agent. He'll serve years in prison while here all you get is a few months or a stupid warning.
Originally posted here by Vorlin
These are my opinions...

Education of how computers work, security, and whatnot can be the life-saver for events like these. If the parents decided to actually be more involved in what their daughter was doing online (which apparently and obviously was a shitload more than "using it as a resource"), they'd still be talking to her today. Why don't the police want to release how long the convos were going on? Because that would almost be releasing what they talked about and you KNOW what they "talked" about. Here's a primary case of a 13 year old girl either trying to be an adult online where nobody knows the truth but her and in this case, chances are she was talking about what she'd "do" to him if she ever met him. They meet, she backs down because she's 13 with no clue, he gets pissed and kills her.

Does this mean she "got what she deserved"? Not by death, no..that's extreme. Maybe if she got beat down once she'd have realized that you don't pull **** like this on the internet. And it's both ways...the guy should've just dropped her like a bad habit the minute he knew she was 13 (or when they met). Instead, he's looking at bad **** rolling downhill because NOW, he's an illegal alien who just murdered a 13 year old American girl after sexxing her up online. The sad thing is is the parents "want to get it out in the open" but they're not taking any blame for it. It's just as much their fault as it is hers and this guy's...

If the parents were more active with their *****ing Compaq computer (or Dell or Gateway..you know it's a pre-packaged POS because they don't know better), they'd know what to look for and what to watch out for. If the girl actually talked to them, if they talked to her, etc etc..a thousand 'what ifs' are in order here but now, because of a bunch of mistakes all rolled into one, she's gone and a brazilian man is gonna hang out to dry.

Try not to think that if it were a guy found dead or whatnot, it wouldn't have half the attention it gets...
You 2 guys just hit the nail on the head. I've been saying it for YEARS!!!!!!!! PEOPLE NEED TO BE MORE SECURITY AWARE AND MORE AWARE OF HOW THE INTERNET WORKS. It's the ONLY WAY that you are ever going to be able to curtail the rising tide of these cases. The FBI says this problem is getting WORSE, not better. And we know that no one was aware of what was occuring because the Feds said so, not her Dad (who was the one that bought her the box and is now beside himself) nor her Aunt.

the problem is not taken seriously (yet) by the authorities, good post, -Leviatan

Leviatan has also hit the nail on the head with this AntiPoint comment he left me. Authorties are still too REACTIVE when it comes to Internet cases due to the way our laws are written, lack of training, and lack of staff. The solution is for them to take a more PROACTIVE role, which they can't do untill they fix the above problems I just mentioned. It's going to be a while .