Chapter 14. Finding People on the Internet
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You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
In real life, people have reasons to be polite. You can’t shove other people out of the way to get to the front of a line or tell your boss what you really think of him because you’ll have to face the consequences of your actions. On the Internet, nobody knows who you are or even where you are unless you tell them. (Or unless they track down your IP address and trace your name and street address through your ISP.)
There’s a sense of distance and anonymity that frees people to drop any social pretense and act upon whatever impulse seizes them. That’s what makes the Internet so dangerous. Without the threat of exposure or fear of punishment, some people don’t just cease being good, they become evil.
Who Are the Stalkers?
Stalkers can be anyone—a next-door neighbor, a coworker, an ex-spouse or ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, a former or current employee, a relative, even a complete stranger. However, few stalkers have the motivation to pick a stranger at random just so they can attack and harass someone they don’t even know. In the majority of cases, stalkers know their victims. Some keep up the harassment for days, weeks, months, and, sometimes, even years.
Although anyone can be a stalker (or a victim), men are typically the stalkers and women are typically the victims. Some different types of stalkers include the following:
- Former intimate partners
The most common stalkers are former spouses, girlfriends, or boyfriends who are hurt or angry that the relationship with the victim is over. They try to extend the relationship through harassment (following the victim, hanging around the victim’s home or workplace, sending letters or emails, constantly calling, etc.). In most cases, the stalker simply wants to revive the relationship and actually believes that stalking can make that dream come true.
- Vengeful stalkers
This type of stalker harasses through threats and even outright acts of violence, such as slashing tires or assaulting or killing his stalking target. Vengeful stalkers believe they are correcting some real, exaggerated, or even imaginary wrong and that the only way to rectify it is to continually harass and threaten or hurt the victim.
- Delusional stalkers
These stalkers can range from dangerous to harmless, but since they base their stalking on some imagined love for or anger toward the victim, they can be unpredictable and frightening. They may alternate between being nice and exploding into a sudden fit of rage. Typically delusional stalkers target high-profile victims such as movie stars or other types of celebrities, although it’s still possible for a delusional stalker to be a coworker or someone else who has a genuine connection to the victim.
Note
Stalkers don’t always fit neatly into one category or another. A stalker might start out as a former intimate lover, then get angrier and turn into a vengeful stalker.
The stereotypical stalker tends to be a loner and social misfit with few friends, poor personal hygiene, and an uneven job history. He often lives alone and rarely cleans or takes care of his home, clothes, or even himself. In general, he cares so little about himself that, not surprisingly, he doesn’t care about anyone else either. Rather than learn the proper way to behave around others, he chooses to stalk someone. It’s not necessarily a conscious or welcome choice on his part, but it’s the only way he knows how to express his emotions, whether for good or bad.
Stalking on the Internet
Stalkers have been around since long before the Internet, but cyberspace has given stalkers a new sense of power and anonymity along with the reach to harass victims anywhere in the world. In the old days, stalkers had to rely on making obscene phone calls or leaving notes in places where a victim might find them. Today, stalkers can do this electronically by sending a barrage of email or instant messages. Typically, these messages are designed to taunt or threaten the victim and create the impression that the stalker is always nearby, even if physically in another state or country.
One stalker even taped a cell phone, with GPS (global position system) tracking turned on, to his ex-girlfriend’s car. That way he could follow her movements at all times. If a stalker sends enough email or instant messages, he can flood the victim’s computer with useless information and prevent her from receiving any legitimate communications. Some stalkers may try to infect a victim’s computer with viruses, RATs (see Chapter 5), or spyware (see Chapter 20) to steal more information (such as credit card numbers or passwords), spy on that person’s personal life and activities, or simply to foul up her computer.
Rather than contact a victim directly, a stalker may spread rumors or embarrassing information through newsgroups or chat rooms. He might impersonate the victim to send bogus email or chat room messages to other people. By insulting or angering others under the guise of the victim, stalkers can confuse a victim, who will not know why or how so many other people seem to be turning against her for no apparent reason.
Besides insulting or embarrassing a victim, stalkers may try to set up a victim for harassment from others. For example, stalkers might give a victim’s email address to spammers, thereby encouraging spammers to flood the victim’s email account. A stalker might also give a victim’s name, address, phone number, and email address to peculiar characters such as religious cults, sadomasochists, pedophiles, or other unsavory characters, who will then contact the unwitting victim, sowing further confusion and nuisances in the victim’s life.
By tricking others into harassing the victim too, stalkers hide their own complicity while still enjoying the satisfaction of making their victim’s life as uncomfortable as possible.
Internet stalkers are protected by outdated laws that define “stalking” as physically threatening someone. Thus, Internet stalking falls outside the usual boundaries of the law. If someone were physically stalking a victim, she could at least call the local police. Over the Internet, however, the local police are generally helpless; the stalker may not even be in the same country as the victim and may be difficult to track down.
Finding Personal Information on the Internet
You can’t become a victim if nobody can find you, so the first information every stalker needs is a way to find a chosen victim. On the Internet, that means getting the victim’s email address, instant messaging ID, or even IP address. Armed with this, stalkers can usually retrieve other types of information such as telephone numbers, home and work addresses, and even Social Security numbers. Give a stalker just one bit of information and he can likely parlay it into an avalanche of personal data.
Searching personal websites
The easiest way to find information about someone is to search for his personal website. Not only will it probably offer an email address, but it will often include other information such as the person’s hobbies, job history, membership in any organizations, and the proper spelling of his or her name. If the personal website has its own unique domain, such as www.JohnDoe.com, stalkers can do a WHOIS search to find the contact information registered for that site. Figure 14-1 shows a WHOIS search for Bill Gates, which reveals that he uses a separate company to protect his address from potential stalkers. And all this information was practically handed to the stalker by the victim himself.
Finding names, addresses, and phone numbers
Not everyone has a personal website, but most everyone will have their private information scattered across the Internet in various forms. Anyone with telephone service will likely be listed in a phone book that can be searched online, such as AT&T’s AnyWho (www.anywho.com) directory. Just type in someone’s name and you’ll be able to find his home address, telephone number, and even directions and a map to his house, as shown in Figure 14-2.
You could also use the people-finding sites listed below to track down someone’s relatives, friends, or former neighbors. Although the person you’re trying to find may be erasing his or her paper trail, chances are good that ex-colleagues or neighbors are not, and they might be able to tell you about a person or where she might have moved.
Now a paid service, this website (www.555-1212.com) lets you search for companies and individuals in both the yellow and white pages to find addresses and telephone numbers. Using a reverse lookup, you enter a phone number, home address, or even an email address to find the name associated with it.
Freeality
Look for individuals based on name, city, and state using a variety of the most popular people-finding search engines such as Switchboard, WorldPages, and Four11 at www.freeality.com/find.htm.
ICQ White Pages
ICQ is a popular instant-messaging service, and the ICQ White Pages helps people find their friends’ ICQ number based on a name or email address (www.icq.com/whitepages).
Infobel.com provides links to almost all the phone books in the world, including those covering the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America, just in case you need to find someone living in Uruguay (www.infobel.com/teldir).
InfoSpace
At InfoSpace, you can search for companies by name, category, or city. To search for individuals, you just need a last name and a state to find the matching home address, city, and telephone number (www.infospace.com).
Lycos People Search
Lycos allows you to search for people by name to find their email address, phone number, or any web pages that contain their name. It also offers a reverse lookup that can translate a phone number into an address (http://peoplesearch.lycos.com).
Switchboard
To search for businesses and individuals based on their name and/or place of residence, try www.switchboard.com.
This fee-based search service offers a variety of results ranging from basic street address and phone numbers to property records, lists of friends and relatives, and marriage and divorce records (www.ussearch.com), as shown in Figure 14-3.
Searches for names, business listings, phone numbers, addresses, area codes, and zip codes, along with reverse lookups of both phone numbers and addresses, are available on the WhitePages website (www.whitepages.com).
Yahoo! People Search
Yahoo! People Search can provide address, phone number, and email information for individuals given a name, city, or state (http://people.yahoo.com).
ZabaSearch
Searches by phone number, Social Security number, and name are available (www.zabasearch.com).
Finding someone using a Social Security number
Because it is required by employers, the Internal Revenue Service, and banks, and is used by many other institutions such as colleges and health insurance companies, a Social Security number can be the quickest tracking device to pinpoint where someone in the United States currently lives and works.
Finding a Social Security number may be difficult, however, unless you once employed or were married to the person in question. For example, if you’re trying to track down a former spouse, look for his Social Security number on an old joint tax return. You can order copies of your old returns from the IRS or your local State Tax Commission. Joint applications for credit cards, loans, and bank accounts almost always list both applicants’ Social Security numbers, and you may ask the credit agency or bank for a copy of these old applications. Divorce papers may list this information, too. If you’re trying to track down a former employee, you can get his or her Social Security number off employment applications or tax forms.
Once you have a person’s Social Security number, you can pay a fee to websites such as Computrace (www.amerifind.com), Fast-Track (www.usatrace.com), USSearch (www.ussearch.com), or Find A Friend (http://findafriend.com) that will provide that person’s last known address.
Finding people in the military
If you’re looking for someone who is currently serving in the military, visit VetFriends (www.vetfriends.com). If you know which branch of the military and which unit someone served in, you can pay VetFriends a small fee to find out where he or she might currently be stationed. If you can’t find the person you’re trying to find, you may be able to contact others who served in that same unit, who might be able to give you additional clues to the person’s whereabouts.
If you’re searching for someone no longer on active duty (such as an old army buddy), try one of these websites: Department of Veterans Affairs (www.va.gov), GISearch (www.gisearch.com), or Ancestry (www.ancestry.com).
Searching public records
The public records database, offered for a fee by KnowX (www.knowx.com), provides a variety of ways to track someone down. If he or she ever ran a business, filed a DBA for a business name, earned a pilot’s license, owned a boat, filed a lawsuit, bought real estate, filed for bankruptcy, or got married or divorced, the information would be stored in public records.
To check a person’s driving record, credit history, voter registration information, criminal record, or birth and death certificates, visit the following website and have your credit card ready to pay a fee: National Credit Information Network (www.wdia.com).
If you’re looking for someone who has committed a major crime, visit the Most Wanted Criminals website (www.mostwanted.org). Who knows? If you find a criminal before the police do, you could get yourself a reward.
Maybe you’re not trying to track someone down, but you just met somebody new and want to investigate a bit before you risk dating or hiring him. To do a background check on someone, try Who Is He/She? (www.whoishe.com) or Instant Background Check (www.instant-background-check.com).
If you’re adopted and would like to find your birth parents, or if you gave up your child for adoption and would like to see what became of him or her, visit one of the following websites, which seek to reunite birth parents and children: AdoptionRegistry.com (www.adoption.com), International Soundex Reunion Registry (www.plumsite.com/isrr), Reunion Registry.com (www.reunionregistry.com), or Seekers of the Lost (www.seeklost.com).
Finding email addresses
With so many people flocking to the Internet, the odds are getting better all the time that the person you want to find has an email address. To track down somebody’s email address, you need his or her name and, if possible, location (city and state, or country). Start at one of the following websites.
EmailChange
If you know someone’s old email address or name, EmailChange may be able to find a current email address. This generally works for the person’s last known email address, so the more recent the email you know, the more likely it is to work (www.emailchange.com).
Meta Email Search Agent (MESA)
This meta search engine uses several search engines simultaneously to look for someone’s email address by name (http://mesa.rrzn.uni-hannover.de).
NedSite
Search for someone’s email address by name, phone or fax number, street address, college attended, ancestors, or military history at NedSite (www.nedsite.nl/search/people.htm#top).
Other options
If you don’t know the person’s location, or if the above search engines don’t turn up anything, try Google Groups (http://groups.google.com). Maybe your target has contributed messages to a newsgroup recently. If so, searching Google Groups for his or her name will find the message and the elusive email address.
Stalking Celebrities
If you’re a celebrity, stalking is just the drawback of being famous. Celebrities worry about strange people approaching them at all times, and now it’s even worse with the introduction of a website that lets anyone jot down sightings of famous people so others can keep track of their movements.
Known as Gawker Stalker (www.gawker.com/stalker), this site constantly lists sightings of celebrities from all over the world and even provides a map showing their last known location, as shown in Figure 14-4.
Protecting Yourself
Now that you know how to track someone down, you also know how others can track you down, and you can take steps to protect your private information. If you don’t want to find your name and home address splashed across the World Wide Web, try one or more of the following techniques:
Get an unlisted phone number. This prevents most of the people-tracking websites from finding your name, address, and phone number (since it won’t be in the telephone directory). Phone companies typically charge for this.
Use a fake or misspelled name. The phone company doesn’t care what name you use, just as long as you pay your phone bill on time. A fake name will throw off the majority of these people-tracking websites.
If you are listed, avoid listing your street address. This way, even if someone finds your phone number in a directory, they won’t be able to find out where you live. Plus, this service is generally free.
Contact the people-finding website directly and request that your name be removed from its listings. Unfortunately, with so many people-finders popping up all the time, this might mean having to contact a dozen different websites—and then there’s no guarantee that a new website won’t turn up with your information anyway. Even worse, just because you request that your name be removed doesn’t mean that the website will do so.
If you include a signature file in every email you send out, make sure you don’t give out any personal or important information in it, such as a home phone number or a website address (unless you’ve taken care to hide any personal information off of your website).
If you don’t want to make your email address available to anyone searching for it, try one or both of the following techniques:
Use an anonymous remailer before posting any messages to a Usenet newsgroup. This also helps keep your email address off lists used by spammers.
Change email addresses frequently. If receiving email isn’t that important to you, use multiple email accounts, and shut them down periodically.
If you really need to hide, avoid leaving a paper trail of any sort. Don’t sign up for telephone service (or, if you must, use a fake name); avoid using credit cards; pay with cash for everything; and avoid magazine subscriptions that use your real name. Eliminating your paper trail can be a lot of work, but it might be worth it if you’re hiding from someone dangerous (like the Internal Revenue Service).
Despite your best efforts, you may wind up becoming an online stalker’s next victim. The moment someone starts sending you harassing emails or instant messages, send them exactly one message asking them to stop. In many cases, a firm and short message such as, “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I feel that you are crossing some boundaries for me and I would prefer it if we end our communication here,” will be enough to stop most people. If the person continues harassing you, do not reply. Some stalkers simply enjoy provoking people; if you refuse to rise to the bait, they may get bored and look for more satisfying prey.
More frightening are the stalkers who target you specifically, either because they know you or because they hold a personal grudge against you because of something as simple as what you posted in a chat room. If you continue receiving harassing emails, examine the email header to find the harasser’s ISP and then send an email informing the ISP of the harassment. Many times the ISP will send a warning to the harasser, and that will be enough.
If the harasser’s ISP doesn’t respond to you and the harassment continues, store copies of every form of harassment as evidence. If the stalker makes a direct threat to you or your family, such as naming what schools your children go to or what color car you drive, contact the police immediately and give them copies of all the evidence you have collected. Sometimes stalkers delight in terrifying victims from afar and have no intention of harming or getting anywhere near you, but it’s better to play it safe and protect yourself.
Just as you would never wander around a dangerous neighborhood and not expect trouble, so you shouldn’t roam the Internet without taking precautions. For more information about protecting yourself from cyberstalkers (and stalkers of any kind), visit the following sites:
Bully Online | |
CyberAngels | |
LoveFraud.com | |
Stalking Resource Center | |
Stalking Victim’s Sanctuary | |
Working to Halt Online Abuse |
Although you can’t predict which acquaintance will grow into a full-on stalker, you can minimize your risk by being polite and civilized to everyone you meet. It also makes sense not to rush into intimate encounters with people you barely know; this can eliminate the largest threat of stalking. You can never stop someone from stalking you if they are determined to do so, but with a little foresight, you can often stop someone from wanting to stalk you in the first place or prevent them from being able to carry it to the next level by keeping your personal information private.