In addition to being stalked online, cyber stalkers can physically stalk you as well as through other channels such as cell phones and text messaging. A new feature called TrapCall, will allow for all numbers to be seen before you decide to take the call or not. You can even block numbers! This will be a great feature to look into as you try to minimize all traces of the unwanted stalking. No more harassing emails - TrapCall.com

Read more about this at Wired.com

Share this post

Hide Sites

Individuals can be subject to cyberstalking… but so can small business and corporations. A new report from the Federation of Small Businesses released recently that over 50% of small business were victims of cyber crimes or fraud.

The Federation of Small Businesses released a report that shows over 50% of small businesses fell prey to fraud or cyber crime within the last 12 months. The report also revealed that 37% encountered phishing emails, 15% were victims to card-not-present fraud and 15% were attacked by viruses and hackers’ break-in.

But what is notable with the report is that 1/3 of businesses do not report fraud or online crime to the police or banks on the grounds that they ‘believe that it would not achieve anything’. Over half of the polled said they would like to know more about how and where to report these types of crime with 44% stated they want a specifically named contact in their local police force responsible for tackling fraud and online crime.

85% expressed their interest in creating a special reporting center in England and Scotland so that they would be able to report incidents to this body. The report shows that fraud with a financial impact cost small businesses between £500 and £5,000, while the average cost across the sector is £768 a year. - Ecommerce Journal

Share this post

Hide Sites

A new state law in Maryland could pass to expand cyber harassment to social networks, currently it is limited to email only. It is important to know that, cyber harassment already exists in social networks and acoss all different types of media outlets including cell phones. This law ought to pass and other states should follow suit in order to prevent cyberstalkers from doing more harm.

The current law says you can be charged with a misdemeanor and sentenced to up to one year in prison or fined $500.

Last summer, a 13-year-old Maryland girl became the target of former friends who put up a fake MySpace page depicting her as a crazy, drunken, promiscuous girl.

Kids can be cruel, and some parents say it’s time for Maryland law to address cyber bullying.

Police protection from cyber harassment in Maryland is limited to e-mail.

Under House bill 580, that protection would expand to any electronic communication, including social networking sites and online postings. - wtop.com

Share this post

Hide Sites

Even though you may be the victim of a cyberstalking crime, you may not want to believe it. Sometimes you might even think this person who is harassing you will stop. But they won’t, and if they do, most likely they will have found a new victim to harass. It is important to recognize what cyberstalking is, and to prevent it from happening to you. Here is another great resource to learn more about cyberstalkers and what they are capable of.

Cyberharassment is harassment over the Internet. This crime can take many forms, ranging from persistent instant messages and emails to outright Internet attacks or defamations. This type of crime is often driven by the perpetrators desire to teach the victim a lesson or embarrass him or her. The perpetrator may post threatening or harmful messages on forums, send threatening emails, or put up Internet pages with false information about the victim. They may sign the victim up for pornography sites, use their email information to post incriminating or embarrassing information, and other such behavior. - Internet Safety for Kids

Share this post

Hide Sites

18 U.S.C. 875 (c) – under this law it is a crime to transmit any type of communication in interstate or foreign commerce that contains a threat to injure another person. Because this law contains any communication the Internet and other electronic communication devices are covered under this law, but only if there is an actual threat to harm somebody. This law does not cover harassment or the posting of messages on bulletin boards, etc. But if somebody is convicted of this crime they can face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
47 U.S.C. 223 – under this law it is a crime to use a telephone or telecommunications device to annoy, harass, or threaten any person at the called number. But in order for this law to be effective the person doing the harassment has to reveal his or her name, so it would not cover cases where the cyberstalker harasses or annoys another person by posting messages on bulletin boards or encouraging others to harass the person. If convicted under this law the cyberstalker only faces a misdemeanor charge which is punishable by not more than two years in prison.

Interstate Stalking Act – this was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 and made it a crime for any person to travel across state lines with the intent to injure or harass another person and in the course thereof places that person or their family in a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury. This law is covered under 18 U.S.C. 2261A. This law is usually not applied to cyberstalking cases because the person actually has to physically travel across state lines to be prosecuted.

18 U.S.C. 2425 – this law makes it a federal crime to use any means of interstate or foreign commerce (phones, Internet, etc) to knowingly communicate with a minor with the intention to solicit or entice the child into unlawful sexual activity. This law does not cover harassing phone calls to minors unless there is the intent to solicit or entice the child into illicit sexual activities.

Read more at The Legal Side of Online Stalking and Harassment.

Share this post

Hide Sites

Here is another great resource to help you deal with cyberstalkers:

At some time in our lives we have probably received unwanted emails or we have gotten into a brief argument with somebody online; depending on whom you are it may have happened more than once. But the problem occurs when this type of behavior continues. If you are getting unwanted email from the same person day in and day out or somebody is following you around to different chat rooms, chances are you are a victim of online stalking and harassment. Many people think that if they ignore the behavior than the person will go away; in some cases this is true, but what happens when that person doesn’t stop? What are you going to do now? - Surfnetkids.com

Share this post

Hide Sites

One way to prevent cyberstalkers from breaking into your email or numerous social network accounts is to change your password atleast once every 3-6 months. If you are like me and can’t remember it once you’ve changed it, make sure you write down a word that will make you remember your password. Never write down your password exactly in the way that it really is. For example, if you use numbers in your password, use a verb or a noun that may represent that number to you: March - for the number 3.

Your password should also consist of both numbers and letters, as well as characters such as a $ or *

To read more about passwords, read this excellent post that goes more into detail on generating passwords to protect you from cyber crimes and fraud. Click here for another excellent resource to help you remember your passwords.

Share this post

Hide Sites

Time recently wrote an interesting article explaining why old people would actually benefit more from using facebook than young adults and college students. Ironically, it was built for college students! After reading this, I thought to myself, do we really need facebook to help us connect with people?

Facebook is five. Maybe you didn’t get it in your news feed, but it was in February 2004 that Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, along with some classmates, launched the social network that ate the world. Did he realize back then in his dorm that he was witnessing merely the larval stage of his creation? For what began with college students has found its fullest, richest expression with us, the middle-aged. Here are 10 reasons Facebook is for old fogies. - TIME

Share this post

Hide Sites

Recently, I ran across a website called Wayback Machine. It’s sort of like a time machine, for the Internet! Some people might think it’s the coolest thing, but what if there is information out their that is posted about you, or information that you have posted in the past and have come to realize that, that probably wasn’t a good idea. Now that there are more cyberstalkers out there, our information becomes more vulnerable. Stuff that we thought was fun and would do no harm, are now becoming cold realities. We all make mistakes, but why should we have to dwell with them forever? With the Wayback Machine,  your information can be archived for years regardless if you took it down or requested someone to remove it.

If you have a website that you maintain, here is how you can prevent this organization and others like it from archiving and searching for your information on your website:

1. Create a .txt document and name it ‘robots’

robots.txt is a document that will tell ‘robots’ such as google or other search engines from searching your website automatically. It’s like turning the switch off so that there is no electricity coming through.

2. Now copy and paste this code into your robots.txt documentt

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

The first line is to idendify that you are referring to the Wayback machine, the second will tell it to disallow any robots snooping around!

3. Upload this document to your MAIN root of your website through FTP or whatever program you use to edit your web pages.That’s it!

If you are not sure how to do this, we can help. Please use this from to contact us for more help.

Share this post

Hide Sites

I am a young woman, fresh out of college. Most marketing experts would label me generation-y or a millennial. I am connected in every way to technology and the Internet. I built my career around the Internet and carry the latest technology in my back pocket. Becoming a specialist in the WWW was my goal since the age of 12. My first website that I ever built was hosted on geocities, before it was bought out by Yahoo!. My new website featured a blinking star background that was tiled to look like outerspace. There were red roses and a corny midi song playing too. I posted poems that I had written; graphics that I created; I even put a picture up of myself sitting at my Toshiba monitor smiling into the 3.1 megapixel camera. I posted stories about my middle school drama and my high school boyfriends. I even had a few friends who I had never seen in real life who I felt ‘knew’ me well. This was before blogs were even called blogs. I called it my online journal. Visitors could leave me comments by signing my guestbook. Or they could email me through my nifty JavaScript contact form. I even posted my own love/hate letters on sothere.com.

Over time I had a presence; I posted and responded to others through message boards; I had my own page on one of those early Community Connect ‘social’ networks (now known as InteractiveOne). This was the ‘MySpace of the day’. Customization was done with HTML tables and div tags. CSS was virtually an unknown language, at least at the time.

I was intrigued about ‘the source code’. Right clicking became the norm when surfing. I wanted to learn how a page was being built. You learn a whole lot faster when you are young. That’s why nowadays I am not surprised to know that a 9 year old can build her own site. HTML is easy. The Title of a webpage in HTML language is written as  <title>This would be the title</title>

One day in college my roommate mentioned to me about this new site called facebook. ‘It’s for college students only so you have to sign up with your college email account’ Meanwhile, in my yahoo inbox I kept getting invites from friends for hi5, Bebo, xanga, classmates, YouTube, flickr, Yahoo!Groups, google groups, and then MySpace. Our college even launched its own BlackBoard, an online portal to connect students and teachers to their courses. Everything seemed easy and fast then. I was connected in every single way to the entire world. I even did my banking online. The internet was safer than walking down the street to the ATM at night! The only people that I actually ever really talked to, in traditional communication channels, were my parents.

Finally, I gave in to the pressure and decided to sign up for a MySpace account. Everyone was doing it, and all my friends kept talking about who was on there and what they were doing. It was like the popularity contest for the cyber world. Gossip is posted openly in comment areas. Everyone sees quickly how many friends you have in your network. Photos of you splattered everywhere: Halloween party ‘06; at home with the family; out dancing; having dinner; photos from the mobile nokia –and then came the iphone; calendar of events, even your own very section for a blog. Uploading became faster and easier too as technology improved on sites like MySpace and so everyone posted even more pictures, and homemade video clips were sooo easy to embed you didn’t even have to know a tag of html! YouTube became a phenomenal and at one point MySpace banned the posting of YouTube videos on their pages. That created an outrage, and after time they quickly allowed it again.

Being a part of social networks was like being a part of an exclusive club. You knew you were ‘in’. It seemed like everyone’s entire life was being consumed by this new fad. Friend’s upcoming birthday parties. Friends tagging you in photos that you never wanted to show up online. Invitations to the night club with scandalous half naked models looking provocatively at the camera. It was like unwanted spam that you couldn’t get rid of, like when you’re out late at night with the girls clubbing and return to your parked car only to find postcards and flyers stuck on your windshield wipers. Quizzes with 10 question and answers, like the old email chain letters, except now it was being labeled as a ‘bulletin’ post where everyone on your list of friends could see it the instant you submitted it. Everything was there for everyone to see.

Once I got close to 1,000 friends I started to think, did I really have 1,000 friends who I talked to daily, weakly, or even yearly? But they wanted to be my friend.. or so at least I thought. The requests kept coming. Do people just sit at their computer every day and click the request button on every profile they run across? Everyday my page was getting hundreds of hits from all over the world from people I had never even met or spoken to. For a minute I thought, maybe there are too many people viewing what I was doing, so I decided to set my page to private. First I had to figure out how to change my settings in the jumble mess of links that MySpace keeps hidden in the corners. MySpace is the worst designed social network ever. Most people are not Designers so I guess that’s ok for them. People get used to looking at sites like MySpace, and Amazon, so they think it’s acceptable.

One day, I got a request from a person who seemed –not so bad looking. His ‘location’ was listed as local. He looked my age. Maybe we’d meet up to hang out? He mentioned. Not thinking twice about it, I clicked the ‘accept’ button.

This entry is the first of several entries to come about becoming the victim of a cyberstalker, and how I was able to help myself and law enforcement, track down the stalker. Currently, the cyberstalker is being charged in a criminal case for his malicious actions, and so I cannot disclose certain information at this time.

If you would like to be posted on the next entry, please subscribe to this blog through rss. To learn more about how to prevent cyberstalking, please click here. If you are currently being cyberstalked and would like to seek more help, then please report the incident using this form and contact your local authority and their Internet Crime unit department for immediate assistance.

Share this post

Hide Sites