Cyber Stalking- What Can Be Done?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Over the summer, I discovered Yahoo! Answers, and in particular, the dog section. I began answering questions there, because I have a lifetime of experience in dogs.

One of my first posts there was in a fun question, someone asked what your dogs mean to you. I replied that my dogs are my family and I love them with all my heart.

Not an hour later I got a private message from another regular from the dog section. She always gave rude, useless answers, but I had had no interaction with her. In this PM, she called me an ‘ignorant, weak-minded cunt’ and said I was a danger to others with my blabbering. I blocked her user name so she couldn’t PM me again, and she promptly created a new account and wrote again. I blocked THIS account, she created a new one.

I have forwarded her abusive PMs to Yahoo, and they have suspended a dozen or more accounts of hers. I have done NOTHING to this woman other than report her PMs and any abusive answers she gives.

Just yesterday, she had four accounts suspended for her abuse. She continues to create new accounts to PM me; I had to block ALL e mail from Y!A today, and that means that I can’t communicate with the GOOD people I have met there; she is essentially holding my account hostage. In one of her PMs today, she told me she would see me in a straight jacket.

The thing is- this is not a teenager trying to be badass. She is a woman in her late 60s who breeds and shows Norwich Terriers. She has co-authored a book about her breed, and she is a dog show judge. We live in neighboring states- me in Indiana, her in Michigan. She knows what breed I show. If she WANTS to find me, she can, and I honestly think she is mentally unstable enough that she would harm my dogs if given the chance.
I know her name and state, but nothing else. All Yahoo will do to ‘help’ me is suspend her account, but she just opens another and continues with the abuse. What can I do to stop her? Would it do any good to contact the local police? One of those services that gives you the person’s address/phone number/etc?

I really need help here… my blood pressure is rising and I really don’t WANT to end up in a straight jacket…

2

Ignore her. When you get a PM or email from her just delete it without opening it. Act like it doesn’t exist. Or get a new email account and username yourself. Cyber stalking is much different from real stalking. In a real stalking situation, you can’t just turn off your computer and make it go away.

3

Close your Y! Answers account. Cool off for a couple months. Open a different one after you wait for a while. In the meantime, watch her posts and see if you can find out more information about her.

If you’ve been able to determine who she is, and she’s a show judge, it should be pretty simple to print out all her crazy posts in which others in the circuit would also be able to tell who she is. Send the printouts to Powers That May Be in the show circuit.

4

I don’t know exactly what you can do for your concerns about her in real-life but on Yahoo, don’t send the next account to yahoo for closing.

When you do that it is basically acknowladgement from you. If you ignore her one account, and just delete her stuff, she won’t know if you are seeing her messages or not. When you get them closed, she knows that she is getting to you.

I don’t use Yahoo answers at all, is there no way for you to just filter her stuff into your Trash? ETA: I mean for you to block or filter her in such a way that she doesn’t get a notification that she’s been blocked.

5

Wait, how do you know all this without knowing her name? Could all her profile info be fake?

Either way, I’d start an account under a new name and email (and, if possible, with a different geographical location indicated and even a username that suggests a person of a different gender).

6

If she was a regular, I assume that the others would’ve been able to figure it out in short order if she were a fake.

Speaking of which, what do the others in this group think of this? Could they help somehow, either on this group or IRL?

7

Stop getting her accounts banned. Simply add the most recent one to your spam filter.

8

She (or maybe that should be ‘she’) could have qualifications but be fibbing the rest. If she has revealed a lot about herself, I imagine the OP could find out who she is IRL. Not that I knwo what could be done with such information.

9

Very few of the other regulars like her; I am not the only one reporting her because it takes more than one report for an account to be suspended. She has no way of knowing WHO is reporting her, Yahoo doesn’t give that information out. In fact, some of the accounts that got deleted, I wasn’t the one that reported it.

Yes, I know her name. Long story short, there was a thread going on with people posting pics of our dogs and telling a bit about them. She posted a pic of one of her Norwiches from the 70’s, the dog posed with a possum it had killed. That same picture was in a book about hunting dogs, telling the owner, etc. The dog’s kennel was called Git Em, and that is part of what she uses in some of her user names… too big a coincedence.

So I have her kennel’s name, her name and her state.

Honestly… I don’t want trouble. I just want to be able to post there in peace, to share the knowledge I have.

There are several other regulasr users that are actively keeping an eye on her for me even when I’m not on the board. They have alerted me several times when she creates an account using my first name in an insulting manner (And I have NO idea how she found out my first name… I NEVER put it out publically on the board.) Some of her user names, using MY name have been (deleted by Moderator per request of OP)

She is truly psycho.

10

Oy. In that case, I’d go with the new email addy route. And stay off the Y!A for a bit. And don’t fill out any information for your new profile (no name, location, hobbies, etc – nothing!). Abandoning an old email you’ve been using for a long time sounds like a huge pain, but I’ve found it usually ends up not as bad as I thought it would be.

11

I feel like you might as well try contacting the police. The worst they could say is that they can’t do anything to help, right?

12

I’m not terribly familiar with Yahoo Answers. Are you just hitting an automated “Report User” button? No doubt that’s still going through a human moderator, but they may not be putting the history together, or may just be too lazy to do anything about it until pressed. Maybe try contacting customer support via e-mail (or phone if available) directly, and keep the ticket open for a few rounds of conversation so they know you’re actually interested in following through.

13

Is posting there really worth it? If you have a relationship with the other regulars, why don’t you go to another board and PM them to see if they want to continue discussions somewhere new? It doesn’t seem worth it to continue on at Yahoo for this level of aggravation.

You’re probably not going to be able to get her to stop. It seems to me you have two choices - ignore her or leave.

14

Sorry to hear about your problems with this person - the internet really sucks sometimes. In the good old days, a loon like this would content themselves writing letters to the local paper and shuffling around the streets muttering to themselves. Nowadays they’ve got a direct line of communication into your living room.

What sucks more is the best we can say at this inchoate time of internet evolution is to just ignore it. I can see myself having a conversation with my son in a few years along the lines of
‘Daddy, what does go fuck yourself, you ignorant cunt, mean?’
‘It’s the internet son, just ignore it.’
Unless a moderator on yahoo answers makes banning this person their personal project, then I can’t see what you can do. Offline, there’s a few things you could do seen as you know who she is, but do you really want to start engaging with such a loser IRL? Not worth it over this IMO.

Anyhoo, one takes refuge from the shite of the internet on well-moderated message boards such as this one. Surely the subject of dogs must be extremely well catered for online, I’d imagine there would be massively active boards out there. Pick one that’s well run and set up shop there. Maybe you do this already - just PM your friends on yahoo answers to let them know where you’ll be from now on.

15

I’m curious - what could she possibly have to say about your statement that you love your dogs like family? Does she have, like, particular arguments against you? What are they? The animosity just seems so random.

16

I went through somthing similar a few years ago- On a fairly innocuous professional board, someone started PM’ing me with over the top, hateful comments to some relatively bland statements I made that just happened to disagree with their statements. It was strange and somewhat disturbing.

First, I reported her to the MB moderators, who didn’t do much about it. It was easy enough to figure out who the person was, so I dropped her some hints that I knew more information about her and then she… blew a fuse! Not good.

I just logged of the site. I didn’t want to step in the crazy.

17

The reason I enjoy that site is that there are a LOT of inexperienced dog owners there that genuinely need help, which I am glad to offer. I have already been able to convince several not to breed their dogs and have them spayed. That is important to me. At least I feel like I am making a small difference for the animals I love so much.

At first, I was just using the ‘generic’ report button, but one of my friends that has been on the site longer gave me an actual e mail address that goes directly to the head mod there, a lady named Maria. Maria is keeping a file on this looney, and has actually deleted accounts before I have even reported anything. They ARE keeping an eye on her now. Her newest account is user name Tell-Tale Heart, and her answers have been rude but harmless so far.

As to why she attacked me for saying I love my dogs… who knows? She announces proudly that she does not LOVE any animal, they are a tool for her to do what she wants to do, and dogs are not ‘family’, she is intelligent enough to know the difference between an animal and a human. And if anyone refers to themself as a dog lover, she always pops out that she thought THAT was illegal, and she doesn’t believe in bestiality. And yes, she has said this to children posting there.

As to PMing my friends there… that involves un-blocking my account; I can’t SEND a PM if I have the block in place. I have been removing it, sending one PM, then bloocking again, so she can’t slip in under the wire.

Like I have said… I am not looking for trouble with her. Just want to be left alone. If I see ANY more trouble, calling the AKC to tell them what one of their judges is up to is my next step, and my local police.

God, I hate drama.

18

I would definitely be going to the police with this one, especially if you know who she is and she has made it clear she knows who you are (or has a pretty good idea who you are).

19

I really don’t think contacting the police is the way to go. What do you think they’re going to do? I can’t imagine that people saying mean things to your username via PMs is high on their list of investigative priorities. Their advice to you will probably be to stay off that board. Now you don’t have any interaction with her IRL - if you escalate matters you might. If she’s truly unbalanced, do you really want to antagonize her?

I think you need take a step back. Surely you can advise people to spay their dogs on some other board. If you don’t want or need the drama, it seems to me it’s easy to avoid.

20

Given that she managed to find out PapSett’s real name, she could very well try to do something IRL. It’s not logical, especially if she lives in a different state, but this lady clearly isn’t logical.

Not to speak for the OP, but Yahoo!Answers has an especially high ignorance quotient to fight. On a dog-related message board or newsletter, there are probably enough knowledgeable people there to offset the truely clueless. On Y!A, if someone in the know doesn’t speak up, you could very well get ten answers advising you to start a puppy mill.