Facebook Got Them Again

[Jollygoodfellow]

Just shows how easy it is to be caught by being dumb,Facebook and Twitter helps out again! MANILA — Philippine police said Wednesday they used Twitter and Facebook to track down a flamboyant gang of young men and women who robbed the rich to feed their drug habits.Police killed their leader Ivan Padilla, 23, and arrested three others over the past week following a rash of vehicle thefts targeting Manila's high society, city police spokesman Superintendent Rommel Miranda said.Miranda said police tracked the suspects by looking at their accounts in microblogging site Twitter and social networking site Facebook."We are very much into technology," he told AFP."These are young people and a lot of young people nowadays are engaged in social networking."Miranda said he did not want to give further details about what intelligence police obtained from the suspects' Internet posts because a hunt was continuing for six other gang members.He said the suspects, most of whom lived in wealthy Manila neighbourhoods, included a number of young, beautiful and smartly dressed women who prowled bars and parties hosted by the rich to scout for potential victims.The gang is accused of being behind a string of robberies of homes located inside gated housing enclaves of Manila's rich and of high-rise luxury condominiums.Among the expensive cars the gang members are accused of stealing are those of a former Filipino foreign minister and a local movie actor's parents.While the gang's core came from affluent families, Miranda said Padilla often recruited young men from other social classes to do the dirty work of robbing people."Ivan Padilla has many rich associates, but when they (intended to) commit a crime they would recruit equally young thrill-seekers who they could influence," Miranda said.Illegal drug use was their common bond, the police spokesman added.In another Internet twist, two Facebook fan pages dedicated to Padilla have quickly gathered hundreds of supporters, with some netizens questioning the police's assertion that he was killed in a shoot-out.Padilla's group was the second high-profile case in a week that police said they had solved with the help of the Internet.Police in the northern city of Angeles said they last week used Facebook to help track down a computer technician accused of murdering nine people, three of them foreigners.