Monday, June 24, 2013

THE INTERNET IS A CREEPY PLACE


The internet is a really creepy place.

I am writing this blog post not to just reiterate what has already been made apparent by countless stories of cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, and news about the government's "surveillance" of phone records (or whatever it was they were doing by culling billions upon billions bits of data).  I writing to ask if anyone has received messages similar to ones I received this past weekend, and to determine whether or not they were just bots, or something worse.

I got some strange semi-threatening anonymous messages in my email inbox from two different sources.

One was delivered as part of a connection request on the professional website LinkedIn. It was sent from a profile name that was listed as "not available" and was listed as being employed with, or part of, something called "Assassin at Brotherhood" and apparently this person is (according to the profile) based in Owings Mills, MD. Anyway, the message was as follows:

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE
I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE 
I KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU 
I KNOW YOU BETTER THAN YOU DO 
CHEERS

I thought this nothing more than probably a crank, or an internet "bot"...until I got another message delievered to my personal email, and was submitted to there via my personal acting website.

I got the message on the same day (two days ago...but didn't see them until today). This message was submitted by someone using the email unknownnumber15@gmail.com. A similar message was submitted to me from this sender as well:

I SEE YOU 
I HEAR YOU 
I WATCH YOU AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA 
JUST KNOW I'M WATCHING 
CHEERS

So I am reasonably unnerved by these two messages and a little unsure as to who to call, or if there is anything one can do with anonymous postings like these. I haven't responded to either message, and don't know if I even want to bother. I have started making inquiries with some friends in law enforcement about how to proceed with this, so I'll see what that brings.  However, I am also writing this blog post just to see if anyone out there has received messages like this.  I could use some peace of mind these are just "bots," or general anonymous "pranks" people pull on each other in this age and are done en masse to just annoy people.

Anyway, I am considering pulling down my profiles everywhere now because of this.  Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Still, if anyone out there has a similar story to this I would love to hear it.