US social networking website MySpace has admitted it detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, more than four times the figure it had initially reported.
The company, owned by media conglomerate News Corp, said in May it had deleted about 7,000 user profiles that belonged to convicted offenders.
MySpace attracts about 60 million unique visitors monthly in the United States and has an Irish subsite, http://ie.myspace.com .
The new information was first revealed by US state authorities after MySpace turned over information on convicted sex offenders it had removed from the service.
The Conneticut Attorney General, who led a coalition of state authorities to lobby MySpace for more stringent safeguards for minors, said there was an exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on the site.
The group has demanded the service begin verifying a user's age and require parental permission for minors. The minimum age to register on MySpace is 14.
'We're pleased that we've successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead,' MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.
The service has come under attack over the past year after some of its young members fell prey to adult predators posing as minors.
