By Joyce LeeThe Daily Northwestern
A 23-year-old man was arrested Feb. 7 in connection with the use of the social networking Web site Facebook.com to lure a 15-year-old North Shore boy into bed.
Michael Macalindong, who lives in Fox Lake, Ill., is accused of posing as a teenage girl and offering to have sex with the boy, but only if the boy first would have videotaped sex with her male friend, Macalindong.
The Chicago Tribune reported that he was an Evanston resident, but police would confirm only that he lived on the North Shore.
“In some ways, from the investigation so far, the boy was coerced into it based on intimidation,” said Brian Bone, a state’s attorney investigator. “There were two meetings that we know of so far.”
Officials said the first sexual encounter between Macalindong and the teen took place in May. When the boy refused to meet with him again in January, Macalindong, a self-employed loan processor, threatened to post the sex tapes on the Internet unless he was given $200. At that point the boy contacted Wilmette police, authorities said.
“Facebook, as it is currently set up, is a hotbed for sexual predators,” said Jacob Novar, an Evanston Township High School senior and Facebook user. “It is set up exactly like MySpace, with only a few minor security upgrades. But overall, you can talk to whoever, whenever.”
The networking Web site, launched in February 2004, was once available only to college and university students with a valid school e-mail address. At the end of 2005, Facebook.com created high school networks, which also requires school e-mail addresses to sign up. In September 2006, the Web site became accessible to the public. Its membership doubled to 16 million users in 47,000 different networks.
“Facebook cannot prevent this; you can’t stop these types of people from getting onto the site,” Novar said. “A lot of people I know accept friends from anywhere.”
Bone said he coordinated a sting operation with Wilmette police after learning of the Fox Lake incident. Logging onto the teen’s Facebook profile, he arranged a meeting with Macalindong in Wilmette. When the man – whom Bone describes as having “short black hair, brown eyes, heavier-set and about 5-foot-10” – showed up, he was arrested.
Macalindong, who graduated from Northern Illinois University in 2005, is accused of hijacking a high school girl’s Facebook account and accessing her online contacts. The Web site’s safeguards prevent anyone outside of a user’s networks from viewing that user’s profile, unless approved as a “friend.”
“We currently have identified over five other individual victims, all from Illinois,” Bone said. “With the charges he’s looking at, there will definitely be jail time with no probation.”
After lewd images and videos were discovered on his laptop computer, Macalindong was charged with six counts of producing child pornography, one count of indecent solicitation of a minor, one count of intimidation and two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, officials said.
Macalindong is being held at Lake County Jail on a $750,000 bail bond, Bone said.
The arrest took place only two weeks after Congress introduced legislation that would make the e-mail addresses of convicted sex offenders available to social networking sites, such as Facebook and the online community MySpace.com.
The bill also makes it illegal for adults to lie about their age with the intention of having sex with a minor.
Reach Joyce Lee at [email protected].
