6 ms·

Ask HN: Someone is harassing me online, using my personal info. What can I do?

• dognotdog 12y ago
  Posting this kind of info is probably at least against the TOS of whatever hosting he uses, and probably illegal in most countries. If you want it taken down quickly, the help of a good lawyer is probably needed. Chasing him and putting out fires is probably all you can do without venturing into illegal territory yourself.
• lutusp 12y ago
  Because of the international aspect, people here aren't going to be able offer constructive help beyond sympathy. At risk of stating the obvious, you need to engage the services of a lawyer.
• jacquesm 12y ago
  Problems like these can be extremely annoying and very hard to resolve. Beyond what lutusp already said (get a lawyer) you're facing an uphill battle because law enforcement in the country where your perpetrator is located (Egypt) will likely not assign a very high priority to resolving your issue. I ban 100's of people daily on my own website and have run in on multiple occasions to people who love nothing more than to ruin other people's lives online from the relative shelter of online anonymity. Worse still, authorities usually don't lift a finger (unless there is child pornography involved or the victim is a politician or a relative of one) and if they do move it is at a glacial pace. If you know who he is then a letter from a lawyer might help, if you only know IP addresses and a general location then you are facing a long and hard battle. Going back through your server log might help you to figure out more information about this person, maybe he's made multiple accounts, maybe one of his aliases shows up in google allowing you to figure out more about him. Any work you can do prior to hiring the lawyer will likely result in some acceleration or maybe even prompt resolution. The only reason this works is because there is an information asymmetry between you and your attacker, he knows all there is to know about you and you know nothing to very little about him. As for your superiors, if they would act on anonymous complaints sent over the internet rather than have a good laugh at it then you should probably explain that anybody with an axe to grind can attack anybody else on the net in this way for no particular reason. Best of luck with all this.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • sumsuni 12y ago
    Thanks for the advice. I have his original IPs, and then a second list of Proxy sites which he used to create fake accounts and also post abusive posts (I had IP-banned him). Presently, the forum is locked down to new registrations until I can find a way to stop this guy from coming back. I don't have his physical address, so not sure how I could get a letter delivered. Perhaps some kind of tool exists to bait him into giving me his geo coordinates? The supervisors are not too pleased with getting 10-15 emails this morning, with a PDF of my personal information and other harrassing information related to my work for the site, which takes place off-work.
    • jacquesm 12y ago
      One user of my website, a girl that one morning decided that it was very clever to undress on cam got a guy that kept on mailing her bosses, her family and so on. It caused no end of trouble. Your bosses are essentially blaming the victim, it's a real pity that understanding of these matters is limited until you are typically hit by it yourself. The fact that they assign any value to this at all is certainly worrisome. If you send me an email privately (jacques@mattheij.com) with what information you currently have on the guy then I may be able to give you a hand (no promises though).
  • notahacker 12y ago
    Surely German law enforcement can at least provide a crime reference number for what sounds like harassment, and enough token followup efforts to convince your supervisors that you're the victim here and the Wordpress.com team that they might wish to respond to your earlier takedown request. However limited they are in what they can actively do against harassment from overseas, it's got to be better than nothing. I can't imagine a lawyer, billing hourly, being any more effective at persuading a probably mentally unhinged person apparently based in Egypt to shut up. As for the Egyptian police, they're pretty busy silencing dissidents already...
• skidoo 12y ago
  Fight fire with fire. Find an altruistic hacker to hunt him down and make his life uncomfortable.
  • lutusp 12y ago
    > Find an altruistic hacker to hunt him down ... Wait, what? How does that describe an "altruistic hacker"?
    • PeterWhittaker 12y ago
      The OP might be distinguishing those who hunt for idealism and sport and those who hunt for profit. He doesn't want a merc hacker, he wants one with shared ideals. Those merc hackers are dangerous, ya know.
  • PeterWhittaker 12y ago
    This got downvoted, and I can understand why, but I have to admit the idea has a certain dark appeal. Well, I snorted appreciatively when I read it, at least. (This is why I dislike downvoting. Ignore ideas you dislike, flag abuse, but downvote "honest opinions"? Hmm. Sure, that begs the question of abuse Vs honest opinions, but that is the purpose of discussion and reason: To sort the abuse from the honest opinions, to accept and improve upon the latter.)
    • jacquesm 12y ago
      At the risk of getting downvoted myself, we turned tables on a bunch of stalkers in the past and have gotten medium to good return on that. That said, it should be reserved only for the hardest cases and when law enforcement refuses to act even after they've been given all the relevant information. Some people just won't give up until they get a taste of their own medicine, and on the internet it is all fun and games until your name and address are out in the open. The fun bit is that once that happened we (usually, we do have a couple of hold-outs) could conclude those cases swiftly.
    • S4M 12y ago
• walterbell 12y ago
  Will he take down the information if you let him back onto the site?
• onion2k 12y ago
  Unban him from the forum. Then he'll (maybe) stop. Maintaining control over your life and online reputation is more important than keeping him banned.
  • bebna 12y ago
    And let the terrorists win?
    • walterbell 12y ago
      After centuries of thought, humanity has developed some concepts beyond dualistic black & white. Everyone is free to choose the terms of their own engagement, rather than handing that power to the first-mover. http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
      • lutusp 12y ago
        > After centuries of thought, humanity has developed some concepts beyond dualistic black & white. Not giving in to blackmail is not about black and white, it's about black and black. And from a logical perspective, you don't mean "dualistic", you mean "excluded-middle" or "false dilemma". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
        • walterbell 12y ago
          Thanks for the correction. I don't have an opinion on the blackmail topic. But the blackmail was preceded by a governance decision and other communities can provide advice or useful precedent. Even when the blackmail issue with this one person is addressed, the governance issue will remain and can re-appear at any moment. Since solving the governance issue will have to be done at some time in the future, it can be done now and offers some chance of de-escalation. The blackmail issue can still be addressed through other means, including legal. But de-escalation helps everyone, now.
• mnw21cam 12y ago
  What country is his blog site hosted in? If it's one of the big blogging sites, you may get a good response by contacting them about his breach of their terms of service. Law enforcement are unlikely to be interested.
  • sumsuni 12y ago
    It's actually hosted on Wordpress.com. I've posted the URL yesterday to their abuse form requesting it to be taken down, but currently remains active. I guess they need time to process it.
• robotgod 12y ago
  Would you getting fired make the asshole stop? If so... Get one of your supervisors to contact the guy and lie to him that you have been fired, take on a new username and stop posting non-anonymous stuff with it.
• tcooks 12y ago
  Dox him or pay someone to do it. Once you have an address, send him a german lawyer template asking him to take down the site. Can you get his infos from the blog?
  • sumsuni 12y ago
    Not much info about him on this blog, but tons of it on me. I'm not sure how much good a German lawyer template will do if he's operating in Middle East.
• ZoFreX 12y ago
  Have you tried talking to him? There have been a few times where I've managed to get trolls and hackers to desist with a friendly chat.
• DanBC 12y ago
  You are being stalked. Research the protections that stalkers need in your country - you might want to set up a website describing what's happening so you can point people to it. Include links to stalking information to avoid as many "it must be something you did" accusations as possible, although there will be some of those. CLEARLY DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. At some point in the future you may want to go to the police and having everything they need neatly laid out is helpful to them.
• Throwaway823 12y ago
  I run a large community as well, and had some similar issues. Occasionally threats work if you can convince them you're willing to take legal action, and you can scare them with evidence pointing to their name or IP address. If that doesn't work, or they're based in Egypt which is going to make legal action difficult, you might be best off to ignore them completely. They're looking for a response. They want to see you upset, they want to see you in a panic, they want to see you begging them to stop, etc. If you ignore them, and never respond or talk again, they'll likely move on with their life. They're not going to maintain a blog on you forever, that takes time, and if they're getting nothing in return, they'll stop, although it might take weeks or months. Now, work on preventing this in the first place. I had my community hosted on the same servers as my personal projects (small startup, didn't realize it was going to grow to the current size), and this allowed people to connect the dots to my name by looking up the server IP and related sites. I'm in the process of trying to separate my personal identity from my community, and to reduce the trail leading back to me. I can't recall how many people are banned from my community, but it's in the area of 5,000. I'm surprised I haven't had more personal attacks, but it's only a matter of time, so I'm trying to separate things before it occurs again. You might want to do the same if possible.
  • jacquesm 12y ago
    I actually did the exact opposite, I made sure that I'm very easy to connect to the community to deflect all attention from those doing the actual moderation. I'm also known as someone who will happily sue you for every penny you've got and I tend to win so the jerks and jackasses tend to tread a little more careful around me. I wished that extended to the users of the website though, who on occasion do very silly things and make themselves identifieable in many ways. They don't usually realize the consequences (even if warned) until it is too late. But as a website operator I'd always make sure to attach both my corporate and personal identity with the service. Why appear like a scam when you're not?
• deodorel 12y ago
  What about using the new google tool that they were forced to do by the EU to get his blog out from the search results? I think you have a pretty good case.
• bruna597 12y ago
  You'll find this helpful: https://digitaldefenders.org/digitalfirstaid/ https://digitaldefenders.org/digitalfirstaid/
• lotsofcows 12y ago
  Ignore him, he'll go away eventually. There's not much you can do so "don't feed the trolls" is the best you're going to get. Of course, some people think differently - see Maddox's page of hate mail for example.