Arrest Is Tied to MySpace

Several teenage boys lured a suspected child molester into police custody at a Fontana park after posting a fake profile of a 15-year-old girl on the website MySpace.com as a joke, authorities said Tuesday.

Michael Ramos, 48, contacted the fictitious adolescent girl on the popular social networking website, wrote sexually suggestive messages, sent a photo of himself online and agreed to meet with the nonexistent teenager, police said.

The boys, ages 14 to 16 and all Fontana residents, identified Ramos at the park and alerted local police, who arrested him Sunday afternoon.

Ramos, also of Fontana, told detectives he was there to meet a 15-year-old girl for sex, officials said.

The teenagers “were thinking on their feet and had the forethought to call the police,” said Sgt. William Megenney, spokesman for the Fontana Police Department.

The five or six teenagers created the phony profile Thursday with a photograph they had lifted at random from the Internet and sent it to a friend to cheer him up because he’d recently broken up with his girlfriend, Megenney said.

Ramos found the girl’s bogus profile and began messaging “her” online, police said.

“As time goes on, these e-mails are getting more progressively sexual in nature,” Megenney said. After several days, he said, the youths decided to cut off communication with Ramos by arranging a meeting at Hunter’s Ridge Park in north Fontana, which they assumed he would not attend.

The boys went to the park and, when Ramos arrived, recognized him from his online photo, watched him from a distance and contacted police from there, Megenney said.

“These kids are extremely lucky this didn’t turn into something they weren’t able to control,” Megenney said. “I think they’re actually kind of spooked.”

With more than 60 million users, Santa Monica-based MySpace is the second-most-viewed site on the Internet, said spokesman Matthew Grossman. One-third of the site’s roughly 270 staffers screen 2 million new images for nudity, hate speech and obscene content each day, Grossman said. He said MySpace had cooperated in many law enforcement investigations.