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The Stalker / Cyberstalker Thread

Web of cyber lies leads to murder, police say

Story Highlights

• Bryan Barrett, 22, shot to death outside factory in September
• Co-worker Thomas Montgomery, 47, charged in November with his murder
• Investigation indicates jealousy was the motive
• Both were chatting online with same woman


BUFFALO, New York -- He was an 18-year-old Marine headed to war.

She was an attractive young woman sending him off with pictures and lingerie.

Or so each one thought.

In reality, they were two middle-aged people carrying on an Internet fantasy based on seemingly harmless lies.

When a truthful 22-year-old was drawn in, authorities say, their cyber escape turned deadly.

"When you're on the Internet talking, you haven't got a clue who that is on the other end," Erie County Sheriff's Lt. Ron Kenyon said. "You don't have a clue."

Full story http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/01/22/deadly.triangle.ap/index.html
 
VIP stalkers prone to serious mental illness
Stalkers

Rather than being hapless eccentrics, the majority of stalkers suffer from serious psychotic illnesses, finds a study of people who stalk members of the British royal family.

The findings, which have been know for nearly two years, but were first made public at a forensic science meeting on Tuesday in Melbourne, Australia, have been instrumental in developing a new approach to reducing risks of attack on the royal family, and UK and European politicians. The approach is to direct "VIP" or star stalkers into psychiatric care.

"We didn't expect such high rates of psychosis. It was very surprising to us," says Paul Mullen, a forensic psychiatrist at Monash University and the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health.

Mullen led the study, which was sponsored by the UK Home Office, with David James, a consultant forensic psychiatrist at the North London Forensic Service.

Mullen and his colleagues scrutinised over 20,000 incidences of stalking members of the royal family, such as repeated and threatening letter writing, and repeated attempted approaches and attacks, from 1988 to 2003. The data was contained in files on 8000 people kept by the Metropolitan Police.

"Just under half were people writing letters repeatedly that were usually threatening or inappropriately amorous," says Mullen. Over the 15-year period, 600 people managed to get close to a member of the royal family, and there were 17 attacks on staff, protection service personal or property, he says.

Drunks and pranksters
Around 3000 of the files covered incidences that were judged to be pranks, or committed by people accidentally or while they were drunk.

The Mullen team examined in detail the files of 250 of the remaining 5000 people judged to be true stalkers. About 80% had a serious psychotic illness, including schizophrenia, delusions and hallucinations, they found.

The finding contrasts sharply with people who stalk non-famous people.

"Typically a fifth of stalkers have some sort of serious or severe psychotic disorder," says forensic psychologist Rosemary Purcell of the University of Melbourne, who has co-published a book about stalkers with Mullen.

The largest group of non-VIP stalkers are rejected lovers, who may be depressed and socially inept, but don't usually suffer psychosis. VIP stalkers, on the other hand, appear most like a subset of stalkers called "intimacy seekers", says Mullen. These people strive to initiate a relationship with their victims, and frequently suffer a psychotic disorder.

"Some [intimacy seekers] have erotomania, a full-blown delusional disorder, where they believe that the victim is in love with them," says Purcell.

Therapy works
In a separate study published earlier this year, James, Mullen and their colleagues found that psychotic illness is also common among people who attack members of the royal family.

The team's findings were vital in the development of a new strategy to combat VIP stalking. As a result, the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, a joint police and mental-health unit, was quietly set up in London by the Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and the Department of Health, two years ago on a pilot basis. James is the centre's clinical director.

Previously, stalkers of British royalty or senior politicians were removed from the scene if they were causing a nuisance, but were not offered treatment. Now FTAC psychiatrists assess the stalkers, referring them on to mental health services if they are in need of treatment.

That strategy pays off, according to James. "After two years, our experience is that most people do not engage in stalking again – in the past it was characteristic that the behaviour was repeated," he says.

Terrorist risk
Reducing VIP stalking is important for protecting individuals and for counterterrorism, says James. Few stalkers go on to launch attacks, but stalkers are responsible for roughly half of attacks against VIPs, including the most serious attacks.

Mullen, James and their colleagues are currently investigating ways to identify which stalkers are likely to pose a threat.

"[Stalkers] who are fixated on a cause, and have a highly personalised quest for 'justice', often delusional in nature, are the ones most likely to breach security, and to be carrying weapons," says James.

Mullen says that star stalkers are an unusual group, with their characteristics determined to some extent by the nature of the prominent person.

"People who stalk royalty may show a strange mixture of affection, and the belief that they are a relative or friend or even the rightful heir. People who stalk the president of the United States are more likely to have persecutory ideas."

Mental Health - Discover the latest research in our continuously updated special report. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/hea ... tal-health

Related Articles

Insight: Warning signs on the road to violence
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns? ... 426014.300
28 April 2007

Love special: Obsession and stalking
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns? ... 025491.500
29 April 2006

Weblinks

Paul Mullen, Monash University
http://www.monash.edu.au/news/expertlin ... act_id=467

James and Mullen's study
http://www.jaapl.org/cgi/content/full/36/1/59
 
Very long article:

Cyberstalking: tackling the 'faceless cowards'
Cyberstalking is a growing problem, but until now has not been recognised as a serious crime. Helen Pidd reports on the battle against the hidden menace online
The Guardian, Friday 24 September 2010 Article history

It was a moment Roland Reed had long dreaded. "Just Googled you, dad," began the text from his daughter. "Why are all these people saying horrible things about you online?" Reed stepped out of work, took a deep breath and dialled his daughter's number. As calmly as he could, he explained that he wasn't really a child abuser, but that someone on the internet had it in for him. A cyberstalker had chosen Reed as his victim, apparently at random. "I told her, 'It's just some nutter, ignore it,'" he says.

But Reed himself couldn't. Every night he logged on to the internet to see what his stalker had been doing to destroy his reputation that day. The allegations were spreading insidiously on internet forums, and he was powerless to stop them. Even if he did have time to contact each site moderator – where one existed – there was no point, he believed. His stalker, posting from behind an untraceable proxy server, would just create a new identity and spring up elsewhere. Plus, he didn't want this belligerent stranger to know that he cared. It would just feed their lust for attention and destruction.

Being accused of paedophilia is damaging for anyone, but for Reed, a 42-year-old youth worker, it was catastrophic. He had already warned his boss that someone had started a smear campaign against him, calling him a child molester on various message boards, and then adopting multiple personas to pile on to these forums and give the impression that lots of people agreed. Luckily, Reed's boss believed him. But what about anyone else who was bored enough to enter his name into a search engine? "Any time a work colleague gives me a strange look, I think, has he found this stuff about me on the internet?" says Reed, who is still being targeted to this day.

People tend to think of cyberstalking as spying on a former or future lover. In the common parlance, it's a relatively harmless, if slightly grubby, activity: Googling somebody before a first date, checking to see if an ex's new girlfriend has failed to change her default Facebook privacy settings . . . that sort of thing. But cyberstalking can be a crime, and today new guidelines from the Crown Prosecution Service recognise it as such. It has actually been prosecutable for more than a decade in England and Wales, under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and the Electronic Communications Act 1998, but the fact the CPS is now using the specific term in its advice to prosecutors will encourage the authorities to treat it as a serious issue worthy of judicial time.

Cyberstalking shares much with its offline cousin, but whereas "real life" stalkers almost always know their victims, usually intimately but occasionally merely by sight, on the internet there are more people who target individuals for no discernible reason – as Reed found out to his horror. It can describe any repetitive behaviour that makes someone else feel uncomfortable or threatened; that might mean unsolicited emailing, instant messaging and spamming, or compiling a dossier of personal information about a person in order to harass, threaten or intimidate them on- or offline. It might mean posing as someone else online, setting up a profile on a social networking site or an email address that is similar to the victim's own. Or, as in Reed's case, the creation of an online smear campaign to blacken a victim's name.

In the most recent British Crime Survey, published earlier this year, 18.7% of women and 9.3% of men said they had been stalked at some point in their lives. And half of all stalkers now use the internet to contact or target their victims, according to research carried out by chartered forensic psychologist Dr Lorraine Sheridan and the charity Network for Surviving Stalking (NSS) last year. That study found that "stalking conducted by an unknown someone over the internet is just as damaging as stalking in the real world . . . All medical and psychological effects, and most social and financial effects, did not differ significantly according to cyber involvement." These include suicide attempts, aggression, paranoia, relationship breakdown plus the stress and expense of moving house and paying for therapy or counselling.

Reed agrees that cyberstalking is no lesser crime. "It's just as hurtful. The fact that it's a faceless coward hiding behind the anonymity of the internet is so frustrating. It allows them to do and say things they could never get away with in real life." And because it is easier to cyberstalk someone but harder to assess the effect it has, cyberstalkers tend to ratchet up their activity, says Sheridan. "Indeed, cyberstalkers may develop a tolerance to internet-based harassment, requiring more extreme activity in order to achieve the same 'rush'," she wrote in the study, noting that "similar tolerances have been observed among internet-using sexually addicted males."

etc....

People need to become much more aware of the information they put out about themselves, says Short. We're in a sort of anything-goes twilight zone, she suggests, where people don't think they are really at risk. "In a way, it's a bit like when the HIV/Aids campaign began and people didn't think it could happen to them. People need to understand that some of their behaviour online opens them up to risk and modify it accordingly."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/24/ukcrime-police
 
Researchers seek to find true level of cyberstalking

A new survey has been launched in an effort to find out the true level of cyberstalking in the UK.

It comes a day after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) unveiled new guidance to prosecutors and promised to get tough on cyberstalkers.

More than one million women and 900,000 men are stalked in the UK every year, according to the British Crime Survey.

But until now no research has been done to find out how many people are stalked or harassed online.

On Friday the Electronic Communication Harassment Observation (Echo) survey, commissioned by the charity Network for Surviving Stalking, was launched by researchers at the University of Bedfordshire.

They are hoping to find people who have been stalked, harassed or threatened through e-mail, on internet chatrooms or on social networking sites like Facebook.

Project leader Dr Emma Short said: "There are stalkers for whom the internet and mobile phones are just convenient 'tools of their trade'.
"But we think there are also vast numbers of internet users who are engaged in harassing behaviours simply because they don't know the rules of appropriate online communication.
"At the moment there are very few widely agreed guidelines or rules about how to behave online - we hope Echo will define behaviours that are generally experienced as anti-social or likely to cause distress in online communication."

On Thursday the CPS's community liaison director, Nazir Afzal, said the new guidance to prosecutors was the first time stalking - and cyberstalking in particular - had been officially recognised.

Mr Afzal said: "Stalkers steal lives, that was the message I picked up from speaking to victims. Victims stop trusting those they know and every stranger is seen as a threat.

"People often can't answer the phone, receive texts or go to a familiar place without fear and trepidation. We want to give people their lives back."

Alexis Bowater, chief executive for the Network for Surviving Stalking, welcomed the new CPS guidelines.

She said: "This will go a long way to improving the lives of victims and to making sure that perpetrators are treated appropriately by the courts. Recognising, in particular, new forms of stalking such as cyberstalking is groundbreaking."

Liz Lynne, Lib Dem MEP for the West Midlands, said: "The crime of cyberstalking has exploded across Europe with the growth of the internet and social networking sites.

"It is not just celebrities who attract stalkers, nor is it just something that affects teenagers."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11404284
 
rynner2 said:
More than one million women and 900,000 men are stalked in the UK every year, according to the British Crime Survey.

Is it really true that about two million British people are being stalked every year? That's outrageous if it is. A country with nearly two million stalkers in it? Unless some of those obsessives are following more than one person?
 
Perhaps the stalkers form an orderly queue outside their victims house, working out their harassment in a rota.
 
It might depend on the definition of stalking. My ex had a gay stalker who never afaik physically followed him but used to keep on sending texts for weeks on end, even though he never got a response.
 
And with the 'send all' function on mobiles, it makes stalking en masse much easier. Or so I'm told ;)
 
Stormkhan said:
Perhaps the stalkers form an orderly queue outside their victims house, working out their harassment in a rota.

There are paranoids who probably believe that. My own mental problems have been mundane - depression. But I once met a guy who believed that the IRA had people in post offices watching him.
 
And with the 'send all' function on mobiles, it makes stalking en masse much easier. Or so I'm told Wink

Sadly, if it's possible, someone out there's probably giving it a pop as we speak. :(
 
Spacey stalker gets four years

A Massachusetts woman who threatened to blow up, torture and castrate Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey in what prosecutors called a "persistent and malevolent" cyberstalking campaign has been sentenced to more than four years in prison. A federal judge in Boston also ordered Linda Louise Culkin, of Quincy, to pay Spacey $124,000 in restitution for bodyguards.

Culkin, 55, is in jail since January 2012, meaning she has about 18 months left to serve. She pleaded guilty in November to charges including mailing threatening communications and sending false information regarding explosives.

Spacey was not in court for sentencing. He said in an impact statement it was “difficult to measure the degree of terror” he felt.

Culkin blamed her actions on mental illness.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/spac ... 87554.html
 
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I've always been baffled by the way these killers and stalkers are described as 'fans'.
A true fan would never harm someone they idolise.
 
John Hinckley shot someone he hated for the love of Jodie Foster. Funnily enough it didn't win her over.

RIP to the murdered singer, never heard of her but that's no way to leave the world.
 
A woman who sent a dead mouse in a Jiffy bag to her ex-boyfriend's new partner has been convicted of stalking.

Poppy Carter, 29, also poured paint and corrosive substances over a van used by Carly Bradbury, the court heard.

Alex Roberts, Carter's ex-partner, said the ordeal left Ms Bradbury "in bits" and she was prescribed antidepressants.

Sentencing at St Albans Crown Court has been adjourned until 18 August in order to carry out a psychological assessment of Carter.

Carter, who lived in Hemel Hempstead at the time, caused serious alarm and distress to Ms Bradbury during a seven-month period in 2016, the court heard.

She had previously denied stalking. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-40777283

Just as long as the mouse wasn't alive when it was posted...
 
A woman who sent a dead mouse in a Jiffy bag to her ex-boyfriend's new partner has been convicted of stalking.

Poppy Carter, 29, also poured paint and corrosive substances over a van used by Carly Bradbury, the court heard.

Alex Roberts, Carter's ex-partner, said the ordeal left Ms Bradbury "in bits" and she was prescribed antidepressants.

Sentencing at St Albans Crown Court has been adjourned until 18 August in order to carry out a psychological assessment of Carter.

Carter, who lived in Hemel Hempstead at the time, caused serious alarm and distress to Ms Bradbury during a seven-month period in 2016, the court heard.

She had previously denied stalking. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-40777283

Just as long as the mouse wasn't alive when it was posted...

She's avoided jail!

A woman who posted a dead mouse to her ex-partner's girlfriend has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Poppy Carter, 29, of Upper Lattimore Road in St Albans was found guilty of stalking Carly Bradbury.

St Albans Crown Court heard she poured paint and a corrosive liquid over her work van and sent anonymous cards depicting a cat watching a goldfish.

Passing sentence on Friday, Recorder Leslie Cuthbert called her actions "despicable, evil and vindictive."

"This conduct was intended to maximise her distress," he told her.

She was told a custodial sentence was justified for what she had done but that the jail term was suspended for two years.

Carter was also given a six-month night time curfew, a restraining order and told to carry out 84 hours of unpaid work. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-40998556
 
While I am glad that stalking is being taken more seriously, I don't think it's seen as serious enough yet. That could be becuase I've always found stories and reports of people being stalked by stuff terrifying! The ghost that follows you from house to house.....
 
bunny-boiler.jpg


Highlights
:

A Phoenix-area man went on a date -- one date -- with a woman he met online.

The meeting likely didn't go well. Not only wasn't there a repeat, he blocked her from the dating app, the woman said. That was last year.

And soon afterward, things went wrong. Very wrong.

Police say that in the next 17 months, the woman sent the man text messages -- about 65 THOUSAND of them, including 500 in one day.

In court documents, prosecutors laid out how threatening the tone of some of them were: One said, "Don't ever try to leave me. I'll kill you. I don't wanna be a murderer." In another, she said she would kill him if he left her, and would wear his body parts and bathe in his blood, the documents said.

And that's just the half of it.

When the man was out of town last month, he noticed in his home surveillance that the woman broke into his house and was taking a bath in his tub, police said.

Police came to the residence and discovered not only an uninvited houseguest, but also a large butcher knife in the front seat of her car.

Officers took her into custody and charged her with felony trespassing. When it was time for her to appear in court, she didn't, authorities said. A warrant was issued for her arrest.

On Tuesday, police in Paradise Valley, a small, affluent town in Arizona, arrested the woman after they say she showed up at the man's business and claimed to be his wife.

Full Article:
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/11/us/woman-text-message-arrest-trnd/
 
On a less scary level, my ex flatmate almost had 'a thing' with one of our co workers .. she sent him a text one day when we were both at work together that said "The sea view from your living room window is beautiful" (we never bothered to lock our front door). I told her that was proper creepy, she explained it away that she was just joking (although she had been around ours before) .. I'm good mates with her now though (she lives three doors down from me and the Mrs) and he's married with a daughter down South somewhere now.
 
I am to boring to stalk :D So i safe

Stalking isn't about the victim though, it's about the stalker. No quality or shortcoming in the stalker's victim can make them more likely to be stalked because the problem lies in the the stalker's own mental problems.

Not getting at you, just reminding you that nobody can be too boring to be fixated on by a nutter.
 
Stalking isn't about the victim though, it's about the stalker. No quality or shortcoming in the stalker's victim can make them more likely to be stalked because the problem lies in the the stalker's own mental problems.

Not getting at you, just reminding you that nobody can be too boring to be fixated on by a nutter.
Can I have a cup of tea then?. I'm stood outside.
 
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