A client of mine is getting harassed, we think by her former attorney who she’s suing for embezzlement.
Someone is posting fake resumes for her and applying for jobs and she gets daily emails and call backs. Is there anything to do short of either ignoring it or playing whack-a-mole?
She’s a very sweet old lady who is freaked out by this and doesn’t deserve it.
Would going to the police be an option in this case? Cause this type of harassment sounds pretty toxic and illegal.
With a police file number and her address and possibly name being used, she might be able to get the company to give her the ip address. Its not a privacy breach of she’s the customer.
Then that ip address can be matched to an isp to find the user, police would need to do that. Talking to her current lawyer would help.
Edit: :up to ip
Yup. Police will probably do nothing, but having that number on file gives requests more weight because refusing to comply could get the police involved.
There’s Mozilla Monitor: https://monitor.mozilla.org
This is for finding yourself in and opting out of data brokers, and finding leaked credentials. They can’t do anything about doxxing or defamation by a malcious party.
Reach out to the job sites directly and report these as fraudulent. Ask them to remove the resume postings.
Also consider making accounts for her on these sites, may make it easier to prevent future posting and to remove any that do appear.
Then, since it sounds like you are her lawyer. Subpoena these sites for information on account, email address, IP address used for the fraudulent posts.
Reach out to the job sites directly and report these as fraudulent.
We’re already doing that, but it’s like playing Whack-A-Mole and when we ask which job sites the calls are coming from, half the time the person calling doesn’t know or won’t tell us.
Then, since it sounds like you are her lawyer.
I’m her IT guy. She’s in communication with her lawyers about exactly that, because it’s exactly what I advised her to do. I actually have a call with them about that tomorrow, I gather they’re not very familiar with cyber harassment laws.
If the perpetrator knows how to install Tor Browser, the subpoenas are likely to be a lot of trouble and expense for a lot of useless data.
I’d personally go the route of getting a new phone number and a new email address.
If she needs for people to be able to reach her at her current number, I’d restrict it to people in her contacts
Even if you manage to pull the information from people search websites, her info is still out there. I’d also avoid giving out the new phone and email as much as possible.
That’s true for the IP but why don’t you try to get the original resume and look through the document metadata? Apart from that the IP seems more viable as more people mentioned in the comments. You could move the email address to span and as for the calls probably block or respond and say that you never aplied? But this seems like impersonation to me.
