How to stalk people on the internet

[bawksy]

We see threads from time to time in this forum asking about whether Amazon Wishlists are secure, whether IP addresses can be traced, and so on. I'm sure the models-only section has plenty of information about how to protect your identity online too. These threads are useful, but the best way to protect from a stalker is to get into the mind of a stalker.

The purpose of this thread is to document in specific detail all the techniques that a stalker might use to find a cam model. This is not to educate would-be-stalkers, but rather to educate cam girls as to how to protect themselves from said techniques.

Before I get started, I'd like to point out here that no preventative measures can ever protect you completely from being found by a stalker. Please read this post here before we get started:

http://www.ambercutie.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1123

 

[bawksy]

Amazon Wishlists

The first thing to check for on a model's Amazon Wishlist is what real information is visible. The shipping street address might be hidden, but often the town shown is the town the girl lives in. Write this down for later.

In the picture below, the girl shows her name as "EM", but some foolish models may have their full real names visible here.

If you have a real name and a town, that's all you need to get started on a Facebook search.

If the girl was smart and hid her name, try buying something from a 3rd party seller. Amazon itself is good about protecting shipping addresses, but often 3rd party providers will email you a receipt showing the actual destination shipping address. Jackpot!

 

[Shaun__]

BB wer u lev?

 

[BlueViolet]

I do love these kind of threads, and I think it may do more good than harm even though I'm still paranoid, but I'm very curious to see everyone's responses.

I feel like this thread will be a double-edged sword, though. Yes, it will help educate the girls on how to be safe and the mindset of a true stalker, but those wannabe-but-not-too-smart-stalkers might see this in public and get some crazy ideas to use on the girls who haven't been educated. At the same time, I kind of like the thought of getting non-model input as well as model input because some members might have some ideas I haven't heard of, or maybe know how to do a lot of things but are actually not bad enough to ever carry them out.

but the best way to protect a stalker is to get into the mind of a stalker.

Very, very true.

For them, if there is a will--there is a way. Always.

Location Services on Phone

First of all, the main things I feel I should add is turn location services OFF on your phone. If I could put that in all caps and not look obnoxious, I would. Geotagging is the craziest, easiest way for someone to stalk you, and so many girls post their pics from their phone onto Twitter.

Want to be freaked out?

http://icanstalku.com/

Before clicking, keep in mind this site will take the pictures you posted on your twitter and give Google Map coordinates to where you live. So please don't go there if you are logged into your model account and have geotagged pictures. I talk a bit about geotagging and how to turn it off, etc. on this thread (Models Only): viewtopic.php?f=17&t=4731&hilit=geotagging

Anyway, I'm a bit afraid to go into my mindset mode because, like I said, I would hate to give anyone any ideas... but I feel like if I really had the mind to, I could locate just about anyone which is why I'm so paranoid about internet safety.

ETA: Keeping with formatting. I like formatting.

 

[bawksy]

EXIF data

My favorite utility for this exercise is the "Exif Viewer" extension for Firefox. An online tool for doing the same thing is here: http://regex.info/exif.cgi but it is very tedious to run every picture through there.

When a photograph is taken by a device that is location-aware, such as a cell phone or some advanced digital cameras, it is possible to embed location information directly into the photo file. In a JPEG file (those ending in .jpg or .jpeg), this location information is stored in what is known as the EXIF data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format

When a picture has location information added to it, it is called Geotagging.

On most location-enabled devices, you can enable or disable the Geotagging capability. Some models forget that it is enabled, however, and forget that their images are Geotagged. They then upload these images to their MFC profiles or otherwise.

Start with a model's MFC profile. Scan through her pictures to see if there are any self-shots where she is holding a cell phone. You'll have the best chance with these. Click on it to get the high-res image, and then use the EXIF-viewer tool of your choice to see if location information is there.

If you find a valid geolocation, check it out on Google Maps. Is the location in a residential area? Was the picture taken in a bathroom or bedroom? There's a good chance that the girl's house or the girl's boyfriend's house is either under or very near the location marker.

Once you know the rough address of the girl, you can use whitepages or tax-assessment information to pull up the owners of the lots in the vicinity. The owners might be the girl (if she's old enough) or it could be her parents. If you suspect it is her parents, plug the names into Facebook anyways, because lots of old people are on Facebook nowadays. Then see if their family members are listed publicly (old people suck at Facebook privacy settings). If not, check out their public pictures anyways. You might find a picture of the girl you are trying to stalk! If nothing comes up, check out a few houses in either direction up and down the road. Sometimes GPS isn't 100% accurate.

This technique is very effective. I found one profile where a girl had taken a picture of her brand new tattoo, and the embedded location was that of the tattoo parlor where she worked.

 

[bawksy]

Birthdays

Even figuring out what year a girl was born in can be very useful. With that in hand, you can usually narrow down her high school graduating class to one or two years. Combine that with her home town, if you know it, and you can usually figure out what high school she went to. You can then plug this information into Facebook, and often get a list of every girl from that high school in that graduating class. Then it's a matter of patience as you scroll through each girl while you try to recognize one of their photos.

Smart girls won't have pictures of their face as their profile picture or otherwise publicly accessible on Facebook. If that's the case, you won't be able to recognize her from the list. To get around this you can use an active technique, and send a few random people from that graduating class a picture of the girl you are trying to stalk, asking if they know her.

This often works well for colleges too.

If a girl is not on Facebook, sometimes you can track down a copy of their yearbook from either high school or college.

 

[Deathdoll]

So what happens when people know where you live? D:

 

[bawksy]

So what happens when people know where you live? D:

Personally? I just use it to scare the bajeezus out of the girl for a bit, and then educate her as to prevent more people from figuring it out in the future. I can only speculate as to how other stalkers use their information.

 

[BlueViolet]

So what happens when people know where you live? D:

Personally? I just use it to scare the bajeezus out of the girl for a bit, and then educate her as to prevent more people from figuring it out in the future. I can only speculate as to how other stalkers use their information.

I don't know if I should be intrigued the way your mind works or scared of it. I'll go with the first.

 

[LadyLuna]

Birthdays

Even figuring out what year a girl was born in can be very useful. With that in hand, you can usually narrow down her high school graduating class to one or two years.

I am *so* glad I've been 25 the whole time I've been camming, despite two birthdays having happened

 

[bawksy]

Other Jobs

Assume you already know the town or general area where a girl lives.

Did she mention what she does for a living, off-cam? You can often figure out her work location, even if she wasn't specific. Did she say she works at a pet store? I bet there aren't more than 3 pet stores in 30 mile radius. That narrows it down quite a bit.

Does she announce her work schedule? Perhaps not directly, but she will often leak it indirectly. Maybe she'll tweet something like "Getting on cam after work today, 6 PM EST!" You can assume that her shift is at least 3 or 4 hours long, so she'll probably be at work from 1PM to 5PM. If you're local, go ahead and drive to each of the 3 pet stores in the area during her shift. You might find her!

If you're not local, you could try sending a fax of her photo to each of the locations. Make up some convincing story as to why a co-worker might call you back if they recognize the picture. You could also try calling and describing her if she has some features that stand out, like a visible tattoo. "Hi, last week I was working with this girl who had a star tattoo on the back of her neck. She was super-awesome, and I wanted to tell the manager how much she helped me. Do you know her name?"

 

[bodisha]

On top of the geotagging issue of pictures, wish lists, and the recent discussion of ip addresses in e-mail headers... there's twitter info itself... i had to tell a model a cpl months ago her real name was visible when she created her twitter account

with the uber-stalkers aside... i doubt if your average mfc member is very technical and the smartest thing a model can do is simply be prudent about entering her info and verifying what is and isn't visible to the general public.... lol.. now with that in mind i've got to go scrub all my personal info off the internet so BluexDakota can't find me and rape me :-D

 

[LailaBaise]

BluexDakota can't find me and rape me :-D

Has your sphincter still not recovered from when I tracked you down? Sawreee!

 

[bodisha]

BluexDakota can't find me and rape me :-D

Has your sphincter still not recovered from when I tracked you down? Sawreee!

fluff... lol... i cried in the shower for hours after that night... lol

 

[bawksy]

Websites - WHOIS

Does the girl have her own website? Is she the webmaster? Often girls will purchase their own domain names, and forget that domain name ownership information is public via a WHOIS lookup. Let's check out http://ambercutie.com -



Unfortunately, Amber and Jawbs were smart. The WHOIS information for this website shows a name and an address, but it's not their home address. Instead, it shows a domain name proxy, which is a service many companies will provide (sometimes for a fee).

In many cases though, you'll be able to see a girl's real name and home address here.

 

[bodisha]

i guess if a member was particularly devious (or pathetic)... they could get a website and enable logging on it... then send a link to a model in hopes they would visit it... which would record her ip address... from there it's just a matter of looking up the ip address

 

[Jupiter551]

I'm glad I'm not a stalker, this all looks like way too much work to do for a girl who'd scream and spray capsicum spray in your eyes if you ever DID find her

 

[Just Me]

Even doing something as simple as visiting a members profile can show a lot of information about where you are located.

http://www.revolvermaps.com/ is a simple thing for someone to put on their profile. Every time someone visits it tracks the ip address of the city, state and country and shows
the time and date of the visit. There are many other things a person could put on their profile to gather information.

 

[bawksy]

Listening

Often the biggest leak of information is a girl's own ramblings. She'll often leak various small details about her life, which you can then assemble into a bigger picture. Smart girls will run some counter-intelligence and drop various false bits of info here and there, but most girls aren't slick enough for that.

For example, one time I was chatting with this one model from an unknown town in Michigan who mentioned that she was stressed out because her uncle had just killed someone in a DUI car accident. It didn't take long checking out various local news sites in Michigan until I found one that carried the story. It had the uncle's full name, which I was able to track to an address. It wasn't the model's address, but it was a start.

 

[bawksy]

Facebook

We're interested in finding a girl's IRL Facebook account, and not any "model" account or page she may have created.

Start by searching on an email address, if you have one for her. This method works pretty well, if a model is silly enough to use the same email for MFC as she did to sign up for her Facebook account. Putting the email address in the search bar will return exactly 0 or 1 profile hits. If you have her, you're gold, if not, keep trying.

If you have her real name, type that in. This will often generate too many results. Try narrowing down the search by also adding her town or state. If you don't have her real name, just enter what you do have, like her high school or college. From there, it's a matter of patience as you scroll through results, trying to recognize her picture.

Once you've found her profile, you might not actually be able to get anything from it, because smart girls will have locked it down. What they often fail to do though is to hide their friends list. Look through the list for people with her same last name. You can often find siblings or parents. With any luck, these relatives (or other friends) will have less restrictive public profiles, allowing you to gather more information. Perhaps her sister has some pictures of your target showing where she works or goes to school?

 

[theend757]

Facebook

We're interested in finding a girl's IRL Facebook account, and not any "model" account or page she may have created.

Start by searching on an email address, if you have one for her. This method works pretty well, if a model is silly enough to use the same email for MFC as she did to sign up for her Facebook account. Putting the email address in the search bar will return exactly 0 or 1 profile hits. If you have her, you're gold, if not, keep trying.

If you have her real name, type that in. This will often generate too many results. Try narrowing down the search by also adding her town or state. If you don't have her real name, just enter what you do have, like her high school or college. From there, it's a matter of patience as you scroll through results, trying to recognize her picture.

Once you've found her profile, you might not actually be able to get anything from it, because smart girls will have locked it down. What they often fail to do though is to hide their friends list. Look through the list for people with her same last name. You can often find siblings or parents. With any luck, these relatives (or other friends) will have less restrictive public profiles, allowing you to gather more information. Perhaps her sister has some pictures of your target showing where she works or goes to school?

So you spent your time looking up girls and finding out what they do?

 

[bawksy]

So you spent your time looking up girls and finding out what they do?

I have, yes, why?

 

[IsabelleTease]

impressive.. and a wee bit scared of bawksy..

 

[Deathdoll]

So what happens when people know where you live? D:

Personally? I just use it to scare the bajeezus out of the girl for a bit, and then educate her as to prevent more people from figuring it out in the future. I can only speculate as to how other stalkers use their information.

That stuff used to scare me when I was like 14, now though it is like 'oh noes you know the general area in which I live.' What could they do with that? Come to the area and try to kill/rape you? Seems like a lot of effort.

 

[Deathdoll]

I stalk people all the time on the internet though, I want to know as much as I can. Wish all people had biographies. D:

 

[AmberCutie]

So what happens when people know where you live? D:

Personally? I just use it to scare the bajeezus out of the girl for a bit, and then educate her as to prevent more people from figuring it out in the future. I can only speculate as to how other stalkers use their information.

I didn't scare you in the least when I pinpointed your general neighborhood by your IP did I?

 

[RedHerby1]

be nice, give compliments, be a regulair in her room, support her when she is depressed, help with practical things like profile html, giving her a mfc premium account, join the acf community and contribute as a normal person there.

are great stalker techniques to get names, emails, facebook from models, they just give it to you.

 

[BullFrogBlues]

Road trips

If the model does road trips there are often things that flash past in the background, street signs, highway numbers and anything that is unique like local store names etc. Knowing their time day you can work out from the angle of the sunlight to get an idea of the direction travelled. Noting the length of time the journey took you have an idea how far they have travelled. Combine this with other knowledge gained you can google earth and/or street view to piece together this information to pin point their home.

 

[Poker_Babe]

So what happens when people know where you live? D:

Personally? I just use it to scare the bajeezus out of the girl for a bit, and then educate her as to prevent more people from figuring it out in the future. I can only speculate as to how other stalkers use their information.

 

[Poker_Babe]

So you spent your time looking up girls and finding out what they do?

I have, yes, why?