Cyberstalking: Cheating Victims

Cyberstalking, a crime in which the attacker harasses the victim using methods of electronic communication. These methods could include things such as e-mail, instant messaging, or even messages posted to a Web site or a group. A cyberstalker more often than not relies upon his/her anonymity to allow them to stalk their victim without being identified. Cyberstalking messages can differ from your regular spam in which a cyberstalker will target a specific victim, often threatening messages, or the spammer will target a multitude of recipients with simply annoying messages. Cyberstalking can be defined as threatening behavior or unwanted advances directed at another individual. A student at a local university reports that she has been receiving

• I now determine whether the victim has been threated verbally or physically with any intention of harm or physical attack.
• Securing physical evidence will now start. The information given by the subject will determine the evidence to be collected. The evidence gathered could be from the following formats; E-mail messages, Chat room messages, Instant messages, Web page images, Social networking messages/wall posts, Mailing list messages, Message board messages, Telephone/cell phone conversations or answering machine messages, Text messages, Postal letters, and Photographs.
• I alert the victims' friends or relatives of the harassment to see if they can assist in any additional information to the case.
• I now determine if the victim has taken any steps to stop the harassment, if so, what methods were used and if any had any result.
• I now insist the victim take precaution in protecting him or herself. As the primary concern is for the victims' well-being.
• Once all information is gathered, I document all relevant information in an investigation report.

Tracing the

Many cyberstalkers who harass individuals like to use free mails accounts to cover their identity. I first contact the email service providers of the emails given to me by the victim and ask the service providers if they can supply the IP logging information of the emails during the time and date of the events. In some cases, I may need a subpoena or search warrant to get the information of the harass account of which I will submit. While I await information from the email provider, I conduct a search using large search engines to identify the harasser by use of the information given to me by the victim. The information used in this search that can provide a result or suspect list would be an email address, name, age, messages boards, etc. By combining a lot of the information given, one could easily build a profile of the suspect which could result in a match. If a match reveals information of the suspect on any discussion boards or forums, I contact the website administrator by mail or telephone and include the suspects' date, time, and activity conducted on their website. I now move to trace the suspect via email headers and other information that can be extracted from emails if emails were used in the harassment. I start by identifying evidence found in the headers as the headers contain the entire path and the route the message took to get to the