Men drawn to neighborhood of voyeur site

Police are called after two women complain about two men seeking the home where young women pose nude for a Web site.

By RICHARD DANIELSON

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 30, 2001

TARPON SPRINGS -- For the second time this month, a Tarpon Springs house that is set up for Internet voyeurism is drawing attention that it never wanted.

First, hackers broke into the ucanwatch.com Web site and temporarily blocked subscribers from watching the young women who live in the waterfront home cavort in the nude.

Last weekend, after St. Petersburg Times published stories about the house and the Web site, three pairs of curiosity seekers wandered through the surrounding neighborhood in search of the 7,000-square-foot home and its occupants, according to police and ucanwatch.com's owner.

Shortly before dawn Saturday morning, police caught up with two Furman University students who had been going to houses on Riverside Drive in search of the house. Peter George Stamas and Joshua E. Cooper, both 21, eventually approached two employees of the Tarpon Bayou Center nursing home on Chesapeake Drive, according to police.

Sgt. Tom Hill said that Stamas and Cooper first asked the women, aged 32 and 48, where the ucanwatch.com house was, then started calling them names.

Hill said the women told police that Stamas "chased" them in a white Jeep, although he said he had no information on how fast the Jeep was moving or other details of the chase. No one was hurt, and Hill said police referred the matter to the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office for a decision whether to charge Stamas with misdemeanor assault.

Contacted Monday, Stamas declined comment.

"It's just a misunderstanding, and it's going to get worked out," he said.

Mike Schriver, who runs ucanwatch.com said Monday he has run off two other pairs of young men who approached the house. The first appeared to be teenagers, he said. The second pair, who showed up at the home's front door Sunday, were athletic-looking men in their late teens or early 20s who said they were there "to see the girls."

Schriver said he told them to get off the property.

Ucanwatch.com is a voyeur Web site that lets subscribers look in on up to a dozen women living rent-free at a home overlooking Kreamer Bayou in Tarpon Springs. The site includes links to hard-core pornographic images and offers subscribers the opportunity to chat with the women. State Rep. Larry Crow, R-Palm Harbor, worked in his capacity as a private attorney to incorporate the company that runs ucanwatch.com.

The site came to the attention of city officials last fall, and last week Schriver filed a complaint that someone had hacked into the site, disrupting his business.

Schriver said Monday he and technicians have worked 16-hour days in response to the hacker and that, contrary to preliminary indications, no customer data or credit card numbers were taken.

Instead, Schriver said the hacker knocked the company's chat function offline, deleted the Web site's password system and deleted a page used to sign up new customers.

"Their intent was to put our site down," Schriver said. The hackers left ucanwatch.com unable to contact 357 subscribers whose passwords were deleted, but they did not get any credit card or account information, which is handled and held by another company, he said.

"We don't have any credit card information in any of our databases," he said.

Meanwhile, Tarpon Springs police continued to look into the company's operations. Ucanwatch.com does not have an occupational license for the house where the girls are, but, like every business in the city, it should have one, police Capt. Ron Holt said.

Generally, not having an occupational license is a code violation that can be referred to the city's code enforcement board, which has the authority to impose civil fines until a business comes into compliance with the city code. Holt said he couldn't say what might happen in this matter.

"All I can say is we're looking into it," he said.

Schriver contends the house does not need an occupational license because no buying or selling takes place there, and the company's computer equipment is outside the city. All there is, he said, is a house, some girls and some cameras.

"There's no business taking place here at all," he said.

- Staff writer Richard Danielson can be reached at (727) 445-4194 or danielson@sptimes.com.

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