Please forgive me, the finer details of this memory are lost in the mists of time – it was a long time ago and I’ve been to sleep since then, ok?
Way back… no, further back than that… further… possibly before a lot of you were born, yeah, that far back… the internet chat room came about. This (these) particular chat room(s) started on this particular ISP around 1996 I think… could be wrong, but a) that’s not likely and b) it doesn’t really matter.
Springboard, Delphi, LineOne, Tiscali and then TalkTalk (again, I could be wrong on the order and I may have missed one or two out, but see points a & b).
I started chatting (wasting time and money) on there around the beginning of ’97 and I soon became a regular visitor. It didn’t take long to realise that spending all that time online was expensive! BLOODY expensive! Like your kid finding all the Pokemon can be ‘found’ a lot easier if he uses someone’s (your) credit card expensive and as much of a shock to the bill payer. (I’m still doing yard work to pay for that, trust me).
Anyway, as an incentive for people to join the moderating team, the ISP had a budget to pay the ‘phone bill for the time the Mod was online. I saw an opportunity to indulge my new (and expensive) hobby and I applied.
I was part of a new innovation, that of making sure abusive chatters were removed from the chat room and if necessary, banned for a term. Back then, ISPs could ban their members because IP addresses were fixed.
One guy used to visit regularly and to be honest, he managed to irritate, upset and bother most of the Mod team and he got kicked and banned almost as soon as he entered the room. The guy would buy up penny shares and then ‘advise’ people in the chat room to follow him in his investments. ‘Insider Trading’ anyone?
Well, he quickly became permanently banned and any time he tried to circumnavigate the ban by name change etc was met with a swift re-ban as soon as we figured out who he really was – or the daft sod changed his name to his registered one – attention-seeking…
So, this guy, Russian_Rostel began to get serious. He targeted a number of Mods and waged a war of terror. Yeah, you may think that because the internet is anonymous, both abuser and abusees are untraceable. Not so. Not so at all.
monica, madi, duncton, Bat-girl (me) and a few others stood their ground in the face of his abuse but when monica received a bouquet of flowers direct to her address, things started to get real and hit home.
Russian_Rostel set up websites with pictures of the Mods he targeted. He would post their address and phone number when he could and a map of how to get to their home.
The police were involved and could do very little until I decided I’d had enough.
Russian_Rostel couldn’t find me because all he had with regards to details were my first name and the town where I lived. He tried his best to find me and when you get a PM (Private Message) from his partner in crime, PinkFloyd, saying:
PinkFloyd: I went to [Redacted town] today, to visit your shop.
Bat-girl: Oh? The shop I don’t own?
PinkFloyd: You weren’t there, I spoke to your assistant.
Bat-girl: I wouldn’t be at a shop I don’t own, now, would I?
PinkFloyd: I told her to tell you PinkFloyd had been in to see you.
Bat-girl: Well done. Now, not only does the internet know you’re a complete fruit loop, so do people in the real world!
I actually believe they thought they could intimidate me. Just shows how some people have no idea how to get a proper measure of folk, doesn’t it?
He set up email ‘bombs’ and in one weekend alone, he sent me 6000 emails. Now, that’s not a great deal these days, but remember, back when dinosaurs roamed the land and we had to pay for dial-up connection at .00002kb per week*, 6000 emails took a long time and therefore a lot of money to download.
*Disclaimer: OK, I exaggerated…
He said some nasty stuff and sent some disgusting emails, including one graphic and pornographic picture of ‘Bat-girl’, ‘duncton’ and ‘S-machine’ in a threesome. Just for the record, neither duncton, nor myself were involved in that, but S-Machine says the guy had impressive ‘statistics’ and if anyone wants to think it’s really him, he’s ok with that.
So, I got myself a lawyer and went about taking him to court. Not an easy task when anonymity is the shield for all keyboard warriors, even today. Delphi, the original ISP helped enormously with that and because we were on their payroll, even if it was as freelancers, they had no problem giving the details of the abusive user to my legal team.
The police couldn’t do much. One officer visited and admitted he knew nothing about this kinda stuff but on his next visit, he told me he’d spent the weekend with his younger brother, learning as much about it as he could – impressive!
The officer advised me to change my email address. My response to that was: If someone was stalking me at my home address, rather than my email address, wold you advise me to move house?
“No,” he said. “But if you change your email address and he still sends you abuse, it proves intent.”
Perfect. I changed my email address from ‘gobby-git’ to ‘gotya-git’ and he fell for it. The emails started arriving at the new address and the case went to court.
In the meantime, because of the stress of it all, knowing I was inches away from being found, I lost weight and hair. I went to the doctor and he prescribed Fluoxetine -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine
Nice one! /sarc
Now, because no crime had been committed, I had to take him to civil court, using my own resources. My lawyer used the Suzy Lamplugh Law as protection for me. Because we could prove that the defendant has attempted, numerous times, to find my real, full name and my address, I should be allowed and able to take him to court using the same anonymity he thought protected him.
Bat-girl took Russian_Rostel to court.
That in itself was ground-breaking. I set a legal precedent by doing that and now, anyone can use the case to ensure their own anonymity as protection from an abuser online.
I printed out a small percentage of the emails he’d sent on that one weekend and took them to court. The waste of paper, printing the emails off was off-set by the Judge’s reaction to their volume. The lawyer’s plan to ‘show not tell’ worked perfectly.
He didn’t turn up for the first case and I was granted an injunction against him.
When we returned to court, a few weeks later, Russian_Rostel sat on the other side of the room. He was a nondescript little man, nothing like the suave, man-about-town he’d tried to portray and I had nothing but disdain for him.
The Judge called my lawyer to his chambers and they discussed the previous injunction. I was advised to agree to drop the injunction because it affected his job. I was reluctant until I heard the alternative – an ‘Undertaking’ or direct promise to the Judge. Now, the injunction could have been enforced, but it would run out in 2 years. The Undertaking, as a direct promise to the Judge would never run out and it meant immediate jail time for breaking it.
I agreed.
The upshot of this little tale is this: Don’t assume there is no way of finding you out or that you’re protected when you set about to disrupt and abuse others on the internet.
My personal rule for internet use is this: Be yourself. Be the same person online as you are offline and only say what you would be prepared to say if the person is right there, in front of you.
Keyboard warriors? Keyboard cowards.
Source: my pics by permission.
Court action is being taken against a cyberstalker who sent death threats and email bombs containing viruses to chatroom moderators
A court injunction has been issued against an abusive LineOne customer who made repetitive death threats against the ISP's chatroom moderators.
Civil proceedings were instigated against Stephen Rutherford on Monday following eight months of written abuse that he targeted at LineOne staff through emails and chatroom conversation. A breach of the injunction could find Rutherford in contempt of court proceedings, and ultimately get him a prison sentence.
Rutherford first logged onto the LineOne chat server eight months ago under the nickname Russian_Rostel. He immediately broke the rule of no advertising in the default room #lobby by instructing users to buy shares in a company called Media Pacific, and was banned from the room by the chatroom operator, Bat-Girl.
He retaliated by posting the address of Bat-Girl in the public chat forum 192.com, and began to email abusive threats and "email bombs" which contained computer viruses to other LineOne moderators.
"For months he came onto the server and gave out worded abuse -- death threats," said a source at LineOne. "He told Bat-Girl before she went on holiday that he hoped her plane crashed and that all her children would die." The spokesman claimed that he has received more than 7,000 threatening emails from Rutherford in the last couple of months, and believes that other moderators have received more.
LineOne was forced to take the matter to court when police admitted that they were powerless in dealing with the cyberstalker. "They [the police] said there was nothing that they could do as there was no law against cyberstalking at the time -- however one should soon be in place." The Home Office is currently considering a proposal made by former home secretary Jack Straw to make online stalking a public order offence.
The essence of the injunction bans Rutherford from logging onto LineOne, contacting Bat-Girl or seeking to have others contact her in order to cause alarm or distress. It is technically impossible for the ISP to ban Rutherford from logging onto its service, as the UK has no fixed IP (Internet protocol) addresses, but the operators are confident that they could detect him by his username.
"He has [and does] use many different names but can normally be spotted by the name, or what he is saying -- he is not too bright," said the spokesman.