Stalking on the Web

You're on a message board, in a chat room, doing the texting thing. You meet someone who sounds really great. You back and forth and over time this person becomes your "best friend".

He or She has used an attractive "avatar" and you actually have this impression that this is how the person looks or there's some connection between the spirit of that person and that image.

You post, getting a bit more personal, and then if you are lucky, it happens before you reveal your real name or address or photo or anything that can link you to the persona you have created on-line.

If you are not lucky, you post your personal details. And if you are one of the many, you will be stalked.

Stalking often begins harmlessly. A strange email, maybe an odd phone call, maybe noticing that on other Message Boards or chat sites, there is suddenly a user very much like the one originally met, who seems to know a lot about you.

You begin to have a creeping paranoia, which no longer is limited to cyberspace, but spills over into your real life.

Strange mail in your mail box? Someone following you? Meeting a peculiar person who knows too much about you?

Your Fear is Real

Stalking has become almost a shadow of on-line communication. It is not "as if" a deranged person met you on line and is now disturbing your life, it "is" that a deranged person has used the Internet to find victims.

You don't have to disconnect the computer, you don't have to avoid communication. You just have to learn how to lie.

With our children we are often far more vigilant than we are with ourselves.

What you need to do now is to begin to kill your current email accounts; forwarding your mail to your new one.

As you receive mail at your new account, (where you have lied about everything, from your real name to the city you live in, (if asked)) you go through the list, advising your friends of your new account, deleting strangers. After about a month, kill the old account, hence everyone you haven't alerted will not be able to trace you.

Kill your accounts on all Message Boards and create new ones in which no true personal information exists.

Do not use your photograph or cute avatars. Use a machine one or the photo of a celebrity, but nothing that can be traced to you.

Don't give up personal information.

This guy who claims to live in California might actually be two blocks north, and that nice lady might be a man.

You don't know, you can't know, unless you have actually met these people in real life, who and what they are.

Due to the fact that I don't live in America, I have been able to gather stalkers as one would weeds. I use a false name and silly drawing as my avatar, and walk into trouble.

Many stalkers try to make it seem that I am stalking them. Despite the fact I don't respond to their posts or private messages, I invariably receive some remarks to make it seem I am the stalker.

This is to throw suspicion on the victim. Most victims are accused of stalking/flirting with the predator as a cover.

Never respond to these kinds of messages, send them to the moderator. As long as there is no private message or public message going from you to the stalker, and no reference to the stalker in any public fora, the case against him or her gets stronger.

Another trick of stalkers is to claim you are lying. For example; "You don't live in L.A.! It's pouring rain and you are talking about heat!"

To which an innocent might, in "defense" reveal far too much of an address. Never do this. Someone calls you a liar, your only response, if any is, "okay".

Sure if you have time you can cut and paste one of the local weather updates, but why bother? This is a tactic of a stalker to pluck information from you.

Calling others liars is often the hallmark of a stalker. For "flame wars" are their joy.

If a stalker can get you into a flame war, he or she "wins" because much of what will be exchanged will be to your disadvantage. After all, many people might see your remarks, not the stalkers, so you are the evil one.

If you find the "same" person on too many Message Boards you frequent, create a new nick, and lurk. Very often you will find the stalker discussing your original persona, maybe attacking, maybe revealing something you have posted elsewhere.

One of the best methods to isolate a stalker is to go into private messaging and create a Message Board within a message board, so that you and those you wish to communicate with keep up a serial conversation, "behind the back" of your stalker.

Often you will kill your email address on the message board so that instead of yourname@yahoo.com it will be ghost@limbo.com.

Use different nicks and avatars at each message board so that your stalker who is looking for Xyzed will not find Xyzed.

Watch the syntax. Everyone has their own style. Learn your stalkers. He or she may spell the same words incorrectly, use the same abbreviations, trite expressions, lack of capital letters, etc.

It's pretty easy to know that "Kiata" and "Sickgrrl" are the same person by their syntax. In this way you won't be babbling to "Kiata" thinking you left "Sickgrrl" in the other forum.

Keep copies of the emails, posts, private messages you received from your stalker in a file you can hand to the police, and find yourself a "geek" who can ping your stalker and learn where he or she is, what provider he or she uses.

There are many "IP capture" programs as there are email tracers. It is not difficult to find that your stalker uses Bell South and comes in via a particular address which can be traced to a particular Internet Service provider who can tell you exactly who was on at a particular time and where they went.

Hence the Internet is not as anonymous as stalkers think. And the jails hold quite a few of them.