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Cyber Predators | For Parents | For Teenagers and Young Adults | Resources

How do I keep from becoming a victim?
What if I become a stalking victim?
What is CyberTipline?
How do spammers and online stalkers find me?

How do I keep from becoming a victim?
Caution is the key. Here are a few tips that can help you and your family keep from falling prey to cyber predators:

Create your e-mail addresses smartly: One should create a gender neutral e-mail address. This is especially important for females, who are much more likely to be stalked than males. Provocative e-mail addresses should be avoided as they may attract unwanted attention.

Create your profiles with caution: If using chat rooms or bulletin boards, exercise caution. Do not share personal information,

Abbreviate your e-mail signature: Your e-mail software will often allow you to attach a signature to your mail. When you allocate a signature, it may be attached to all of your outgoing mail. This may provide others with information about you that you would prefer not to be distributed. Don’t give out your phone numbers and addresses to everyone. Your e-mails can easily be sniffed and abused.

Remove your e-mail headers: When e-mail is sent, the header contains information that may include identifying features such as name and e-mail address. This information is often sent without the sender knowing. Check the options of your mail software—you’re probably able to turn this feature off.

Keep a low profile on newsgroups: Depending on the newsgroups you use, posting messages to them may attract unwanted attention. If it is necessary to post a message to a newsgroup, try using a third-party e-mail site such as Yahoo or Hotmail, or perhaps send messages through an anonymous e-mailer.

While these measures will not provide absolute anonymity, they will make it harder for someone showing an unhealthy interest in you to identify you.

What if I become a stalking victim?
If you become a target, it is very important that you document any and all communication from the stalker. E-mails should be printed and copied to a disk, other written communication saved for future reference and phone calls logged for date and time.

In addition, it is important to refrain from contact with the stalker. This may be especially difficult in cases where the offender is a former intimate, but by initiating contact the victim may unwittingly encourage more frequent activity by the stalker.

What is Cyber Tipline?
The congressionally mandated CyberTipline is a reporting mechanism for cases of child sexual exploitation, including child pornography; online enticement of children for sex acts; molestation of children outside the family; child sex tourism; child victims of prostitution; and sending unsolicited obscene material to a child. Reports may be made online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at www.cybertipline.com, or by calling 1-800-843-5678.

For more information, visit http://www.missingkids.com/ and click on Cyber Tip Line link.

How do spammers and online stalkers find me?
The goal of spammers—people who send unsolicited "junk" e-mail to promote products or services—is to contact as many people online as possible so they can generate as many responses as possible. Children are especially at risk because they are more likely to communicate with strangers and participate in chatrooms.

Spammers can find you in many ways, including:

Member profiles and online white and yellow pages: There are various websites that allow users to create profiles and search for members with similar profiles. Spammers use these sites to collect e-mails according to interests. Other sites serve as people- or business-finder websites that contain addresses from various sources that often share contacts. For example, a service provider might automatically share new e-mail addresses with a major e-mail address search engine that, in turn, makes the new addresses available to the public.

Chatrooms: Spammers harvest names from chatrooms, as it allows them to target their mailing lists.

Web pages: Spammers have programs that "spider" through web pages looking for e-mail addresses.

Web, e-mail, and paper forms: Some sites request various details via forms (e.g., guest books and registration forms). Spammers can get e-mail addresses from those either because the form becomes available on the web or the site sells or gives the e-mail lists to others.

Surfer's web browser: Some sites use various tricks to extract a surfer's e-mail address from the web browser, sometimes without the surfer noticing it. One example of this is making the browser fetch one of the page's images through an anonymous connection to the site. In order to access the page, some browsers give the e-mail address the user has configured into the browser as the password for that account.

Chain letters and hoaxes: Spammers will use a hoax to convince people to provide their e-mail addresses. For example, some spammers use chain letters with promises of free gifts to you, and anyone the letter is forwarded to, as long as it is copied to the spammer. They often claim to be associated with large reputable businesses.

Cookies: In addition to extracting e-mail addresses from websites by the methods described above, many websites and e-newsletters use "cookies" to track your every move on their site. A cookie is a unique identifier that a web server places on your computer. It is a personal serial number assigned to you that can be used to retrieve your records from their databases.

Cookies can be used to track where you travel on a website or what choices you make in response to options as you move through a site. Any website that knows your identity and has a cookie for you could set up procedures to exchange their data on you with other companies that buy advertising space from them. This means that once your identity becomes known to a single company listed in your cookies file, others might know who you are whenever you visit their sites. The result is that if a child goes to a soft-porn website and signs up to win a trip, that child's name could be sold to other soft- and hard-core porn sites as well as to travel agencies.

There are many convenient and legitimate uses for cookies. For instance, they allow "mass customization" of the content on web sites and cannot pass viruses from the server to your hard drive.

Cookies cannot be used to get information from your hard drive that the server did not place there. They cannot capture an e-mail address from your browser and cannot steal credit-card numbers. They cannot capture personal information about you unless you volunteered such information in response to an offer of some kind. If you do volunteer personal information, that information could show up in a cookie and can be used with other information about you that is collected using cookies.

There are legitimate Internet resources that can be misused.

Once someone has your e-mail address there are legitimate Internet resources that can be misused to find additional information about you.

For instance, by inputting an e-mail address and conducting a "reverse lookup" on a people-finder, a stalker can find your full name, home address and telephone number. With that information, people can use a mapping tool on the Internet to determine where you live and exactly how to get to your house.

In addition, they can conduct web and newsgroup searches to see if you have a website, are on a website or have posted any messages to newsgroups. In essence, within one hour, a stalker may be able to find such information as your name, home and business addresses, home and business telephone numbers, preferences and hobbies and even information about your family and neighbors.

(Adapted from "How Do Spammers and Online Stalkers Find You?" in The Front Line, August 2001, Volume XXXXIV, page 8-9. Copyright © 2001 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. All rights reserved).

Cyber Predators | For Parents | For Teenagers and Young Adults | Resources