I’ve heard some horror stories about people online having their identities found “doxxed” and used to harass or blackmail them. Admittedly, its usually in context of someone confessing something disgusting/horrible, but I never underestimate the determination of bored jerks.
Beyond just cyberstalking, have you or anybody you know been internet detectived?
Yeah, when I was selling off the shelves in my garage, a guy called with interest. He shows up and decides to take them all, but needs to come back later with his truck. Next time he shows up, he relates as how he’s a private investigator and indicates that he knows I work for the Department of State. I gave him a raised eyebrow and said “well, that was 12 years ago, but yeah, I did.” I was thinking “don’t give up your other job.”
I night have been once right here on the SDMB. There was a crazy poster here a few years back. Smashthestate I believe. A social activist. He actually lead a “hobo’s union”. Some crazy stories and he had some crazy views. His thread on “monkubines” was a classic (regarding the morality of monkey prostitutes or some such).
Well, in one thread I made a joking comment about him stealing the hobo union’s money. He lost it. Threatened to sue me and everyone else here. Well, threatening lawsuits is a good way to get banned and so he was. I felt kinda bad about it…but then again he was crazy and banning was probably only a matter of time.
Very shortly after that I got an odd phone call on the answering machine. It was garbled but it had phrases like “I know who you are” and “you’ll pay” and “you won’t get away with this”. Something like that, my memory fails me but you get the jist.
I did happen to note the area code. The number wasn’t familiar for sure and the area code was nothing I recongized. I scribbled it down and soon forgot about it. A few days later I am still wondering about that odd phone call and do a bit of research. That area code is for Chicago.
Odd indeed.
Not exactly - I was on another web forum (still am in fact) - and I “exposed”, among with others, a scam some guy was running. I’d met the guy IRL a few times so he knew who I was, so in an attempt to discredit me he linked to some news stories about some silly things I had done when younger that tended to portrary me in a bad light. This could have been a big problem potentially, as I’d expressed some fairly silly opinions on that website which I didn’t want getting back to me IRL. Fortunately nothing happened 
Oh by the way the scammer was eventually caught, prosecuted, and made bankrupt. He now claims to have found Jesus.
I was detectived by someone here. But I’m not going into detail.
No. I make a point not to give specific information about schools, employers or other organizations I belong to. My user name isn’t meaningful in any way and it isn’t used anywhere else except on this board. It’s just me typing MrSmith as the most generic name I could think of and some random numbers, except I didn’t it the ‘r’ hard enough. And I never bothered to change it.
As for social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, I keep that shit pretty locked down as well.
Basicaly my policy is to not give out any information that I wouldn’t give a psychotic hobo union.
I was relating a tale of an internet troll and someone posted a reply with a horrible story of when she was a moderator on a board and another poster took a spite to her over something. This person managed to track down who the mod was in real life and where she worked, and with a bit of manipulation she got the mod fired from her job.
I find that hard to believe.
Was the troll wealthy?
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! YOUR SECRETS ARE SAFE WITH ME.
I had one former board member research my family and try to shock them with some of the stuff I have posted here. Unfortunately, my family is more than a little eccentric and they knew about all of it anyway. My mother sent a cute reply back thanking the person for finding her long-lost son and giving updates on my status. We still laugh about that. I always make it easy to to find me though. Sometimes the best defense is none because it kills the thrill of potential cyber-stalkers. I have had some people contact me with all kinds of weird things over the years. Most of it was welcome just to find out something new, hear a weird story, or find a long-lost person.
Oooh, Oooh! I’ve got one.
This dates back to the days of Compuserve as a major ISP; like, very early '90s. At the time, I was highly interested in UFO legends and was an active member of CServe’s UFO forum.
Without getting into too much extraneous detail, some mook in New Jersey began using sock puppets of himself to spam various UFO forums with wild tales of how he had been a consultant to Bell Labs in the 1940s and claimed bulletproof knowledge that the invention of the transistor was in part due to analysis of materials recovered from the purported crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, NM in 1947. Within a few weeks, it became apparent that this was all some sort of odd publicity stunt to drive traffic to Jersey Guy’s web site, which was a small (think garage-shop) personal computer retailer.
I had a small role in helping to expose the guy, and made a number of posts to CServe and couple of other UFO forums, debunking some of the claims and airing out the guy’s many, many socks. Well, one of these posts had been done from my company computer at work (on my lunch hour). Jersey guy worked out what domain the message had come from, called up my employer, and, posing as the ‘Security Manager’ for the Jersey outfit, accused me of sending threatening messages via the company network. To the credit of my boss at the time, he was able to figure out early on that the guy calling was a crank, and nothing came of it.
About 10 years ago, a guy who wanted to harass me found two postings on the Internet using my real name. One was defending free speech, even if unpopular, and the other was justifying gay marriage as a personal and private matter. He brought both posts forward as “evidence” that I should not be allowed around children.
And that was when I learned to never use my real name on the Internet.
Maybe if you people weren’t so abusive and abrasive this shit wouldn’t happen. Aggravating crazy/marginal people, or people with little to lose, is not the act of a kind person.
I’ve posted on the internet pretty regularly since 1994, and gotten into plenty of arguments. Nobody yet has done anything like this to me. Of course, I know not to kick people when they are down. I have an instinct for it, I guess.
Speak for yourself, Mr. Sunshine.
Heh
You are about to be tracked down for a second time 
Oh, I have my flaws, and I’m not the world’s most cheerful person. 
My wife did a bunch of Googling on me when we met. She had just gotten out of an engagement with a guy who had a long string of lies during their relationship culminating with him stealing a bunch of stuff from her family and fleeing the state. So I can’t say I blame her. Luckily, I’m a pretty boring guy.
I’ve had people on forums try to look stuff up on me in a “Haha… does [Name] mean anything to you?” sort of way rather than a life destroying way. Aside from some goofy c.1997 postings on Usenet (alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die) and archived ASCII art, still nothing. Benefits of clean living, I suppose.
I wouldn’t know.
Was that the guy who started the union for people who beg for money on the streets? Not so much itinerant hobos, but panhandlers. He was also comically Marxist and completely anti-police to the point of ridiculousness.
If we’re describing the same guy, he was based out of Ottawa, not Chicago. I remember this little fact because I have friends there, and I always thought “yeesh, I hope they never have to run into this guy”.
He may have moved, or visited Chicago later on, so that certainly doesn’t rule out his phoning you, if he was indeed the culprit. But when he was posting here, he was living in Ottawa.
a quick Google search later
The third hit for “ottawa panhandlers union” is a Straight Dope thread from SmashTheState. The first hit is the Wikipedia entry, which lists SmashTheState’s real name.
Internet detective shenanigans indeed!
Who said we did anything whatsoever to deserve detectiving? Mine was just some guy with an agenda who absolutely had to prove that something I’d posted about myself on this board was untrue.
I’ve been online since 1994 too, what’s your point?
My advice is, if you think that your being detectived, then start slipping pieces of disinformation about yourself into your posts.
So when they unmask you with "Hah you slept with your bosses wife, and your wifes sister "! ,then you say yes and I’m also a serial killer and the Popes long lost half brother.