JOIN USA couple of weeks ago, Neha Singh (name changed), received a message in her Facebook inbox from a person whom she had recently added as a friend. The concerned person, after adding Singh had told her that he is a student in one of the language departments of Delhi University and had seen her speak in a seminar. However, days after this interaction Singh received a video compilation of her photographs which she had published on her Facebook profile over the years.
“I was horrified to see the pictures. The person told me that he was in fact from my hometown and wanted to surprise me by doing something romantic,” Singh said. Soon she filed a police complaint after getting a flurry of messages from him. “He used to send messages that he has been in love with me and that he had got married to a wrong person. The police traced the IP address to somewhere in North campus and summoned him,” Singh told Metrolife, adding that it was only after the police intervention that her stalker stopped bothering her.
Singh’s case is not an isolated one. The Delhi police now have reasons to believe that there is a whole new dimension to cyber stalking and have categorised cases like that of Singh’s into ‘long lost love’.
Senior police officers speaking to Metrolife
elaborated on the nature of complaints they have been receiving since past few years. According to police, the complaints can be broadly categorised into four types. The first one is where a person creates a fake profile of himself/herself and harasses the victim. The second type of stalking is by creating a fake profile of the victim and attempts to defame her or him. The third one, and one of the oldest in the books, is hacking. But the rise in use of social media websites has also ushered in a fourth kind.
“We receive many complaints in which the victim pointed out how their stalkers were known to them. The accused in some cases took years to find out details of their love interest. In fact, some of the accused carry this interest from their school days. The stalkers in these cases manage to find out their so called love interests on social media websites and start harassing them,” said Madhur Verma, Deputy Commissioner of Police (North district).
According to Verma, the problem becomes worse when the stalking takes a leap from the virtual world to the real world.
“In almost all of the complaints we received, we found out that the stalker manages to find out the address of the victim. This, even after the victims do not give out their addresses,” Verma told Metrolife, adding, the stalkers mostly belong to the 20-30 age group.
The senior police officer also added how during interrogation it comes to fore that the accused in almost all the cases carry a lifelong obsession of their victim. Metrolife also spoke to an investigation officer of one such case and found how elaborate stalkers can be in their methods.
“Today, social media groups give you the option of ‘check-ins’ which means you can share in public your movements or the places you visit. Stalkers take a clue from all this and usually they take this obsession of theirs to commit all kinds of unlawful acts. One has to be more cautious with the privacy settings of social media websites they use,” the officer cautioned.