Struggling With Cyberstalking

Shortly after she fired a freelance photographer for downloading pornography, a vice president at the Lexington Herald Leader newspaper started getting strange phone calls from men who said they had met her in chat rooms and wanted to meet her in person.

Then came subscriptions to Playboy, Penthouse, Playgirl, Bride, and Seventeen magazines, none of which she ordered. A male executive who was also involved in firing the photographer started getting calls from females who thought they'd met him in chat rooms he never visited.

The publisher of the Knight-Ridder newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky, began receiving porn spam. In the most outrageous twist, Jones Fish in Williamsburg, Kentucky, called the vice president to discuss her order to stock a five-acre lake with fish. Of course, the vice president knew nothing about the order.

At that point, the newspaper managers thought it would be a fairly simple matter to report the incidents to the police and have the man arrested. Unfortunately, three years have passed, the harassment continues to this day, and authorities are apparently powerless to do anything about it.

With cyberstalking on the rise, the Herald Leader case provides a useful lesson for any executive who may run into a similar problem. When the incidents first began, the Herald Leader hired private detectives to track the activity back to the photographer. Herald Leader management pleaded with the postal inspector and the telephone company, contacted local and state police, and even the FBI, according to a high-ranking executive at the paper who asked not to be identified.

What's the Crime?

Under most state laws, this activity qualifies as stalking, which is usually a misdemeanor that law enforcement officials typically won't bother with unless there are more serious crimes or threat of bodily harm involved.

Because of these light penalties and the confusing, immature nature of state laws on cyberstalking, these cases are difficult to prosecute, says Lieutenant Commander Chris Malinowski, who heads the New York City Police Department's computer crime unit.

So what's a company to do if cyberstalking hits close to home?

"You have to attack things like this in phases," says Paul French, computer forensics lab manager for New Technologies, a training firm. "First you find out who did it. Then get legal advice. And if you can't get it stopped, file a civil suit."

This is the procedure followed by Gregory Peck, a senior information technology security analyst at a Fortune 500 company, when he stumbles across cyberstalking cases among his employers. He gets involved in such cases an average of three times per year, he says.