Two years ago, I wrote about Stickam.com, a live video start-up that former employees and public documents said was owned by a Japanese pornography operator.
The article asked if a company with that unusual pedigree could keep a live-video site free from smut and keep its large community of teenage users safe from all the potential abuses.
This year, three arrests have underscored why that question needs to be asked.
Earlier this week, Dan Goodin of The Register wrote about Lawrence Joseph Silipigni Jr., who was recently indicted on nine felony counts on charges of using Stickam to trick underage girls into removing their clothes and performing sexual acts live on the Web.
Mr. Silipigni video-recorded at least one such session and later posted the video to the Web. Two other teenage Stickam users subsequently came forward to say Mr. Silipigni tricked them as well, according to court documents. Mr. Silipigni told the F.B.I. he collected more than 100 webcam videos of girls he met on Stickam by posing as a teenage boy. In Stickam’s defense, Kate Sowell, from the agency Lewis PR, said it was Stickam itself that reported the incident to authorities.
But this was not the first time sex crimes involving minors had been committed live on Stickam.
In February, a popular Stickam user named Jonathan Hock, age 20, was said to have sexually assaulted his unconscious girlfriend while broadcasting it live on his Stickam feed. Mr. Hock ended the broadcast himself, according to Christopher Stone, who runs the gossip site StickyDrama and recorded video of the event, because he said he recognized a crime was being committed. Stickam terminated Mr. Hock’s account when it later learned of the incident. Mr. Hock has been held without bond in Arizona since his arrest and is awaiting trial.
Finally, in June, a multiagency sexual crimes task force arrested Richard Allen Chaney, 23, from Costa Mesa, Calif., for persuading a 14-year-old girl to engage in live-video sex acts on Stickam. Mr. Chaney is also accused of arranging an in-person meeting with this minor on Stickam and having sex with her.
To be sure, monitoring the activities of 30,000 online members at the same time is daunting (although other live-video sites like Justin.TV don’t seem to have this kind of problem). But Stickam has never addressed its connections to pornography, nor is it transparent about the critical issue of its monitoring procedures.
Over the summer, I e-mailed a few questions about Stickam’s safety practices to Steven Fruchter, its chief executive. (Mr. Fruchter was formerly director of information security at Hypermedia Systems, another in the same family of firms owned by the Japanese pornography company). I asked Mr. Fruchter via e-mail what the standard was for monitoring live feeds on Stickam, what actions the company takes to prevent crimes or stop them once they are in progress and how many staff members they have devoted to policing content.
After a back-and-forth exchange with Lewis PR, representatives of Stickam reported that Mr. Fruchter did not want to answer those questions.
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