We all know that the internet poses challenges and opportunities
that mirror real life. It's sometimes easier for someone to
fraud you online than in person. Also, if you have children, you
should make it a point to be aware of where they go when they are
online. You should also know who they're talking to as well
as what information they are sharing about themselves.
MySpace.com has received a lot of attention lately because of
what teenagers are sharing with each others and strangers. It has
become a haven for predators. Rather than focus my attention on
MySpace, I'm going to provide you with several resources that
you may use to find out information about someone. It's
intended to help you be more aware of your surroundings and to do
what's necessary to protect your family. I've chosen not
to focus on MySpace simple because next year it will be some
other chat room, social networking site, blog, or whatever. This
information will apply regardless of the site getting all the
attention.

The first site I'd like to mention is one that you can enter
your home address and it will pull up any registered sex
offenders close to your house. The site is "http://www.familywatchdog.us/">http://www.familywatchdog.us/.
It display the offender in one of three colors. Either red,
yellow, or green depending on the offense level. It provides the
individuals picture, their convection, address, and the distance
they may live from your house.

The next site will allow you to do many interesting things
including reverse phone number lookup. If you're receiving
annoying calls and only have the number you can discover who owns
the number. The site is at "http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/">http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/.

This next site allows you to perform general background checks on
anyone for a fee. It's at "http://123nc.com/">http://123nc.com/. It will show you any
criminal offense that anyone has been convicted of within North
Carolina. If you own a business you can use this site in run
background checks on applicants.

The last site does both background and credit checks for a fee.
It's at "http://www.integrascan.com/">http://www.integrascan.com/.

I hope this information is useful to you in that it helps you
become more aware of your surroundings. I'm not providing
this information to you so that you can harass anyone regardless
of what they may have been convicted of in their past. You do not
want to break the law yourself. I also assume no responsibility
for you actions and how you may use the information provided by
the sites.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 12:00:00 and is filed under deconfuser. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.