A registered sex offender was sentenced to two decades in prison after engaging in sexually explicit chats and exchanging photos with a 12-year-old and a 13-year old girl.
Franklin DeCapua, who was living in Rochester, New York, found the girls in Nebraska by using a popular social networking app called Whoshere on his iPhone.
The girls, who are neighbors, were using it on the iPod Touch. The trio sent each other sexy pics and chatted about meeting for a sexual encounter. DeCapua was arrested before the planned meet-up.
DeCapua, 35, is a registered sex offender who pleaded guilty to the charges. U.S. District Judge Charles Siragusa, who called DeCapua a “sexual predator,” sentenced him to 20 years in federal prison with lifetime parole supervision.
Whoshere, offered gratis in iTunes since 2008, was rated suitable for users age 12+ for “mild or infrequent mature or suggestive themes.” Now boasting some two million users, developers MyRete call it “ideal for making new friends, dating and networking or just chatting and swapping pictures.”
Users can set searches to trawl for people based on dating, friends, casual relationships, gender, age, etc., then enjoy unlimited and “no-fee text messaging and send and receive pictures with other users.”
Social networking-cum-hook-up opps like Grindr have been in the news in sex assault cases involving minors, but this is the longest sentence we’ve seen connected to an app.
DeCapua’s “rich criminal history” was documented in a court filing from Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Gestring. His rap sheet includes sexual contact with a 12-year-old girl in 2001, a 2008 conviction for endangering the welfare of a child and pending charges for “sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child related to sexual contact with yet another minor child.”
Via 13 Wham, Democrat and Chronicle
Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco freelance writer who heads up Cult of Mac Magazine, our weekly publication available on iTunes. You can find her on Twitter and Google+. If you’re doing something new, cool and Apple-related, email her.
5 responses to “Sex Offender Gets 20 Years for Chats, Pics with Minors via WhosHere App”
I had suspected for awhile that apps like WhosHere could change the balance of power in the fight against sex offenders. Great to see this app doing their part to help clean up the problem.
Here’s to the hope that one day these kids get charged with distribution of child porn. Right now sexting is the cool thing to do, and yet we don’t use the laws that are ment to protect kids to teach them a lesson.