Never Got It, Still Not Sure
Posted on: Thursday 10/18/2018 01:23:20
Excuse me if I wrote about this before. In early January 2017, I ran across a friend of a friend on FB whom listed herself as a writer and artist. She listed her website. I went there out of curiosity. It said she welcomed communication from like-minded, creative people. Cool. I can always have another writer friend. I left a comment on her site with my email address. A day or two later, she replied, and we decided to communicate via email, and collaborate on some writing projects. Let's call her Joan.
She was very intelligent and studied on damn near everything, more than I. And very pretty. She said she lived in a European country. After a couple of months I got a message saying she had been having erotic thoughts about me. She started sending me messages saying what she wanted us to do with each other. I'm a man. I began joining in on the game. And it was a game. We even had a "safe word". My god, did she turn out to be filthy and wild. I won't go into detail. Once a day emails turned into several times a day. She then convinced me to get on Whatsapp with her. The unbridled porno photos, video clips, and voice recording started floating in. I will say at this point she was not at scammer. At no point did she show any indications of it.
This kept up until I had to move here. I had trouble keeping up at the pace we had been with everything going on. Sometimes it was a day or two before I could respond to her. She started to get impatient or upset with my lack of the regular attention/responses. One day I tried to message her on Whatsapp and er account was gone, under both her real and pen names. She had either blocked or unfriended me on FB, or deleted her account. I didn't want to seem creepy, so I sent a "test" email to her with an account I have that doesn't have my dame or initials as a part of address in it. I have that set up as a dumping place for my incoming spam. It did go through. I let the possible contact thing go at that time.
My first thought was she was being impatient and not understanding of what I was going through, and disconnected. I also had a worse thought. She said she had a violent ex. He had severely hurt her in the past. She said every year around the time of divorce, he would return from what ever country he had been holed up in. He would be hanging around waiting for an opportunity for a repeat performance. I was worried. For a couple of weeks, I looked daily at web news from her city to hopefully not find some horrible tragedy. To my relief I didn't.
At that point, I started deleting the over 1,000 emails from her. I forgot about it at that point, except for occasionally. Today while going through my emails for some year old legal emails, I found a couple hundred more from her that somehow slipped my eye, and started deleting them. I was wondering again what the hell happened. The sexual aspect had been exciting for me, but honestly, what I really missed was collaborating with her on poems and helping with comments/edits on her novel.
I was back to my original thought of her not being understanding of what I was going through. Then, this bizarre thought occurred to me, that maybe not-so-far-fetched these days. I hope you can follow this. Joan always talked about her 18-year-old daughter Cynthia. Cynthia has some mental illness and agoraphobia, so stays in her room on her computer 95% of the time, often going for days without sleep. So. What if the Joan I was communicating with was really someone created by a real Cynthia? Maybe Cynthia's real mom found out about her daughter's very deviant activities, and either made Cynthia shut it all down while she watched, or shut it down herself and took the computer stuff.
Consider this world of ours where teens and college students gain enough computer knowledge to be able to hack the pentagon and shut down large companies for a few days. Does what I am thinking sound possible or not? I know it shouldn't bother me. It honestly doesn't. It was just a what if that popped up.
Simon Says:
Since almost all the people I’ve corresponded with for the last 15 years or so have been online, this kind of dislocation is something I’ve become familiar with. It applied to Journalspace particularly, where many people were highly secretive about their real identities. In one case a couple set up an account as an entirely fictional character (I think she was called LadyJane) who was supposed to be an English aristocrat. It was just a joke, but a lot of people assumed she was genuine until guilt made the perpetrators admit it.
What I’m saying is that you don’t have to be a hacker to be deceitful about your identity. Unless you were on live video chat with her then she could have been absolutely anyone. Why suppose she was an 18-year-old pretending to be her own mother? If she were indeed an agoraphobe in her teens then why shouldn’t she just say so? There doesn’t seem to be any reason why she should lie about her identity.
kittenheel Says:
It wasn't necessarily guilt that outed that English couple. Those two fought with each other all the damn time, and one time he got pissed off enough at her to rip the mask off and tell everyone it was made-up. It was an entertaining level of train wreck to watch from the sidelines. But yeah, people lie about their identities online all the time. Probably more often than they don't. /homepage
Simon Says:
Ah! I didn’t know the full story behind that one. Thanks.
snow Says:
Ok, sorry off-topic-ish, (isn't that what we do here?) but Simon and Mary or anyone else computer savy - is there a way to send an email that will sort of, "self-destruct" after a certain period of time?
My stalker has done this to me twice. Most of the time I'm on top of it and take screenshots but there have been two emails that have just "disappeared" after about a 2 week period. I've searched every folder and didn't trash them in my sleep.
I know he has mad computer skills so I was just wondering if anyone else knew of this. /homepage
kittenheel Says:
I don't know much about it, but according to this site (https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/self-destructing-email) your best course of action is going to be getting screen shots ASAP. /homepage
snow Says:
Omg.. What a fucking freak. Who DOES that!
knifeboy Says:
ProtonMail, Snow. You can send emails that are untraceable because- they are encrypted, and wherever you are, the email goes to a server in Switzerland, then to the addressee. You can set the messages to self- destruct after a designated period of time./homepage
Simon Says:
As KB says, ProtonMail. It does indeed boast just that feature (as well as encryption of email contents so even ProtonMail staff can’t read your emails – or so they say!). Of course that means it deletes the message from the server, so the recipient can no longer access it there. If you save a copy of the email on your local machine then there’s nothing that can be done about that. I always copy and paste the contents of my email correspondence, not out of paranoia but because I correspond a lot by email and have a dreadful memory.
Check the email headers of your stalker’s next message. They will tell you where it originated. In fact it may even feature in the ‘From’ field.
https://protonmail.com/
Most country’s governments don’t like it, for obvious reasons. It’s based in Switzerland, where criminals and tax-evaders need protection.
snow Says:
Jesus Christ. Why do people go to such lengths to stalk?? MOVE ON.
Fritz The Bootlegger Says:
Screenshots are the best way. I’m willing to bet that if you saved the email direct to your hard drive it might save as well, but screen shot it and create a file in your Notepad.
snow Says:
I saved all but the two. I also noticed that if I replied to them, it kept them as a record in my email account. I just didn't know that capability existed and why the fuck?? Find someone else to fuck with.
Simon Says:
I find the feature useful for making ransom demands.