Espinthebottle.com.

You may not have heard of it, but chances are, your kids have.

The problem is, child predators may have too.

Espinthebotte.com is one of the newest social networking websites for teen flirting, visited by 4 million teens.

Linda Criddle has spent years searching the web to find sites where kids could be in danger.  She says “espinthebottle makes the hysteria around myspace and others look like Disneyland”.

Criddle put espinthebottle.com to the test for KING 5.

Using an e-mail account that showed her full name, and that she was a woman, Criddle was able to create an account, claiming to be a 17-year-old boy.

Going under the name of “Chuck”, Criddle started chatting with Ellie, a 16-year-old honor student and athlete from Seattle.  During their conversation, Ellie made one critical mistake.  She revealed her personal e-mail address.

That’s all it took.

Criddle was able to Google Ellie’s name, and find out that her high school basketball team was going to the state tournament.  Then Criddle did a search in the white pages online to find Ellie’s address, and used a mapping tool to find her home.

The total time between getting Ellie’s e-mail address and finding her home address?  2 minutes.

Ellie and her mother were shocked to meet Criddle face-to-face when she arrived on their doorstep and introduced herself as “Chuck.”

“It was frightening to think about how much information you had on her and her whereabouts and where we live. her basketball schedule, her school, knew her routine”, says Ellie’s mother.

Criddle says that most people don’t realize that with hotmail and yahoo e-mail accounts, their real name is given along with their e-mail address.  While espinthebottle tried to prevent her from giving it out, Ellie says she was easily able to sidestep it by putting spaces within her e-mail address.

espinthebottle.com statement:

"We designed both eCRUSH.com and eSPIN.com to put our users' safety first.  Unlike some other social networking sites on the Internet, our goal is to create a safe, PG-13 environment for teens.  We have several measures in place to ensure that teens feel protected when using our sites.  For example, users are anonymous and anyone who joins the site at age 18 or older is prohibited from reaching out to a user under 18.  In addition, all youth submissions are screened for personally identifiable information and inappropriate content before they can be posted.  Teens flirt.  They always have.  What we offer them is a place in which to do so online in a safe, friendly way."

Although in the statement, the company says anyone under the age of 18 is prohibited from reaching out to another person under 18, remember that Criddle had claimed to be 17-year-old when she contacted 16-year-old Ellie.

Criddle says you should never use your real name online, never use any numbers that people can associate with you, such as a birth month or year, and never believe the person you meet online is who they say they are.