AUSTIN -- A statewide sweep of suspected online predators landed several local men behind bars, KPRC Local 2 reported Monday.

Weston Lee Starks, 24, was arrested on May 11 on charges of soliciting sex online with an underage girl.

He found an investigator with the Cyber Crimes Unit of the Texas Attorney General's Office instead of the 13-year-old girl he was expecting when he arrived at a Sugar Land apartment complex, officials said.

"There's only one way to effectively deal with criminals like that and that is to get them off the streets and keep them off the streets," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said.

Benjamin Alexander David, 20, of Katy, was arrested on May 3 after he allegedly went to meet a 13-year-old girl for sex in Sugar Land. He was also met by undercover officers.

Investigators said he thought he was meeting a teenager on MySpace.com.

The second arrest of John David Payne prompted Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to urge MySpace and other social networking Web sites to increase efforts to protect children and teenagers from explicit images and sexual solicitations.

Payne was arrested in December after he arrived in Bastrop for an alleged sexual rendezvous with what he thought was an underage teen he met on the Internet.

While he was awaiting trial, he was arrested again May 10, after he allegedly engaged in graphic sexual conversation with an investigator posing as a teen on MySpace. He also solicited sex from a different investigator posing as another girl in a separate chat room.

"This shows how aggressive and how dangerous these child predators are," Abbott said Monday at a summit he hosted to discuss online criminal activity. "Even a one-time law enforcement arrest is not going to stop predators like this."

Abbott said Web sites like MySpace -- a social networking hub with more 72 million members -- should make it harder to find profiles belonging to underage youth and should use software that automatically scans all uploaded photographic images and blocks those that are pornographic.

A spokesman for Myspace did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been working with MySpace to identify ways to make it more difficult for young people to put up too much information about themselves, said Michelle Collins, director of the center's exploited children unit.

The center also has partnered with the site for a campaign to teach teenagers how to protect themselves online.

"There isn't any one solution that's going to solve the problem," she said. "It's really going to be by joining collective forces that we can have the biggest impact."

"My girls are on MySpace and from time to time, I go to their Web sites and I check them. I look at what they've got on there. I look at their girlfriends' Web sites because I want to see what kind of information they're putting out there," parent Janeal Whitefield said. "They hear it from their teachers. They hear it from their parents, but it doesn't sink in until something horrible happens."

Abbott's cyber crimes unit, which marked its third anniversary Monday, has arrested 80 men for using the Internet to solicit minors for sex. About half have been convicted and sentenced to an average of six years in prison, while the rest are awaiting trial.

On the Net:

NCMEC "Don't Believe the Type" campaign: http://tcs.cybertipline.com