Catching the Catfishers: Disarm the Online Pretenders, Predators, and Perpetrators Who Are Out to Ruin Your Life

By Tyler Cohen Wood

Learn to protect yourself online with this comprehensive guide to safeguarding your information and identifying scams, stalkers, bullies, and more.

Today, your online identity is an essential part of to your personal and professional success. But many of us don’t understand this digital Wild West and the dangers that lurk around every corner. We are often unaware of the digital “breadcrumbs” that we leave behind with every post—and how easy it is for a malicious person to use these clues to do us harm.

Now cyber-security expert Tyler Cohen Wood shows you how to protect your online information and identify online threats. Catching the Catfishers is for every user of social media, teaching you how to:

• Safely and successfully navigate the online world.
• Protect yourself and your children from online predators, cyber stalkers, and chat-room bullies.
• Detect if someone is not who he or she claims to be.
• Learn what digital bread crumbs you leave behind and how to clean them up.
• Control your own online identity.
• Safely use social media for dating, business, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781601634856

Book preview

Part I

Understanding the Online Domain

1

Controlling Your

                        Online Persona

When I first met my coworker Charles (not his real name), it was like kismet. We both cared passionately about what we did for a living and how it affected the law enforcement, federal, and intelligence communities. Both of us were technically proficient and had many years of experience supporting federal law enforcement as digital forensic analysts. We became very close professionally. We collaborated on numerous projects and spent a great deal of time together. I knew that I could count on him for anything, and he knew the same was true about me. To me, Charles was a genuine and caring person who cared passionately about his work. A few months into our friendship and working relationship, however, I began hearing stories from other people who had worked with both of us on separate projects that he was arrogant and not a team player. I dismissed these stories as gossip. I knew Charles. There was no way that the person I knew and had worked closely with for a year was arrogant or rude, or didn’t work well with others. They just don’t know him, I thought. A year into working with Charles, we became friends on various social media sites. I began to follow his blog and Facebook posts. After just two weeks of following him on social media, I began to see a very different side of Charles. He was extremely condescending in his posts and comments to other people, and put them down, often harshly, with very little provocation. He was arrogant and argumentative over minor things such as predicting the weather. I was completely shocked. I knew Charles. I had worked closely with him for a year. I had a very distinct perception of him, but there he was right in front of me, showing a completely different side of his personality. The person I saw was not at all the person I thought I knew. At first, I thought long and hard about which was the real Charles, but then I realized that it didn’t matter. This arrogant online identity completely overshadowed the Charles I thought I knew. Perhaps predictably, our working relationship suffered. I no longer sought him out as an expert, and we eventually went our separate ways.

There is a saying that people tell the truth when they are drunk. The same can often be said for people when it comes to their online presence. Piecing together an online persona, if done correctly, can often yield a much more realistic impression of who a person is, better, even, than spending time getting to know him or her in person. Many (but not all) people tend to be much more honest and open about their innermost thoughts and feelings when they are online. Perhaps this is due to the fact that they feel anonymous and therefore protected behind their computer screens or mobile devices. Regardless of the reason, you will discover how to piece together the real person behind the online identity, as well as how to control the pieces of your own online identity to portray yourself in the best light possible.

We live in two worlds, and both are very real. One is the physical world that we have always lived in and are comfortable with. The other is the virtual world in which we create—sometimes inadvertently—our online identities and personas. These digital identities are just as integral a part of our daily lives as our identities are in the physical world.

Your online identity and persona can reveal a very detailed picture of who you are: your likes, your dislikes, your political views, your religious affiliation, your hobbies, and whom you associate with. Unless someone is deliberately manipulating it and disseminating untruths (more on this later in the book), a person’s online persona is often more real—more authentic—than the persona he or she presents to the everyday world. In about an hour, I could learn virtually everything there is to know about you, simply by putting together all the disparate pieces of your online profile. Does this surprise you?

When I would conduct a digital forensic examination for a major crimes case, typically I would research the social media cache on a suspect’s computer and investigate his online presence. Depending on the information that was out there, within an hour I could put together a highly detailed profile of the person. I would know where he liked to go, what restaurants or bars he frequented, who his friends were, his posting style, his personality, as well as more intimate details about his life including his hobbies and dreams, information about his children, and the list goes on. I got to know these people in such detail that I felt as if I had indeed known them all my life. But this is not just a skill for someone who works in computer forensics; anyone can learn do this. You can learn how to read an online identity and put together all the digital puzzle pieces. Of course, this cuts both ways: Others out there can also discover all the puzzle pieces of your online identity. The good news is that you have absolute control over what and how you post and, therefore, how people will perceive you online.

The Components of Your Online Identity

Law enforcement can piece together a suspect or witness profile based on various elements of his or her online identity. The same elements comprise your online identity. You have communities that you post in or follow, such as blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter. These communities link you to other people. If you have friends who could be viewed as unsavory, you can be labeled the same way. It is the birds of a feather, flock together concept, which means that you are probably similar to the people you choose to associate with. Based on what you post and which blogs and sites you follow, your pattern of online behavior can easily be established. Law enforcement can establish your political views, your personal interests, whether you drink too much or not at all, and whether you are easily agitated and like to bully others online. (We will go into much more detail on behavior later.) Then there are the easily accessible online records that contain personal information such as addresses, criminal and financial records, credit reports, and schools or universities you attended. Using these three elements—communities, behavior, and records—a law enforcement official, a forensic analyst, a commercial predictive advertising company, or anyone with sufficient interest can look for consistencies, patterns, and anomalies in your online identity. With these elements, a life pattern or unique signature of the real person—you—emerges behind the online identity. Obviously, you have little control over credit reports or public records, but you do have complete control over what you choose to post, Tweet, or blog about.

First steps

It is important that you do a search of yourself online to see what others see when they search you. Try to do this with an unbiased opinion. It might make sense to you that you post your political views very passionately, but try to read what you have posted from the perspective of someone who may not agree with you and consider how they would view you. Might they find that your views are so passionately posted that they could perceive of you as a troublemaker and not want to hire you? Could those pictures from that bachelorette party come back to haunt you later? Use search engines to look yourself up. Search for your e-mail addresses, phone numbers, full name, avatars, or nicknames. You want to know what others will see and what perception of you they will put together. Again, think of it in terms of communities, behavior, and records. So, what if you find something that you don’t want others to see? We will cover how to clean your online identity in later chapters but for now, take active steps to start thinking about how each thing that you post is a digital puzzle piece that, when put together, creates a detailed image of who you are.

The Rules of Engagement Are the Same

One of the most important points that you will learn throughout this book is that you want to behave online the same way you behave in the real world. Your online identity is instantly accessible to people all over the world who will make snap perceptions about you based on how your present yourself, just as they do in the physical world. Let’s say I walked into a room as an expert on cyber topics, wearing a crop-top shirt and a miniskirt, to give a briefing to a senior official. Let’s say I started my briefing by saying, Ohmygod I am sooooo excited! This presentation is going to be totes amazeballs! The senior official would automatically write me off as a joke, no matter how knowledgeable I was about my topic. It works the same in the online world. If I am always posting content that makes me appear immature, that is the perception people will have of me. If I walked into my boss’s office and told him that I was sick of my job and thought he was an idiot, or if I showed him a photo of myself at Arlington National Cemetery flipping off the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (like the photo that Lindsey Stone posted on her Facebook page¹), I would be perceived as disrespectful and would probably get fired. Most people would never do this in real life, so why do it online? There is no difference. Again, people will perceive the you of your your online identity the same way they will perceive the real you. If anything, you have to be more cautious about how you are perceived online because once it’s out there for everyone to see, it’s incredibly difficult to remove.

Your Legal Rights

Laws governing social media are being debated and created each and every day, through policy and cases. There are privacy laws that dictate who owns your online content, and whether your words are protected by free speech when you are operating in the online domain. According to Social Media and the Law: A Guidebook for Communication Studies:

If a social media user posts information to their profile, can I assume that it is not private information and thus free to use?

There is no categorically absolute answer to this question. Context, the nature of the information, the role of the user and your relationship with that user, the privacy settings, and any other implied and explicit terms of disclosure are all relevant in determining if information shared within a social network site can be appropriately shared of used elsewhere.²

Essentially, in layperson’s terms, the answer to this question is, it depends. The crux of the issue is whether or not a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding self-disclosed information, as well as who actually owns said posted content. Should we really have any expectation of privacy to self-disclosed content that we have selectively and voluntarily chosen to post on social media?

If I walked into a room of friends and gave each of them a copy of a photograph of me doing something inappropriate, do I still own that photograph or have any ability to control what my friends do with it? What expectation of privacy do I have with regard to that photograph? I am not a lawyer, but logic dictates that because I have given it to everyone in that room, they can do anything they want with it: pass it along to others, post it on a billboard—you get the idea. It is my personal opinion that posting anything to social media is the same as physically giving it out to people, and that you no longer have the ability to control what they do with that content in its original form. (An exception: If they change the content and use the changed content in a defamatory manner against you, that is a different story. We will discuss that in Chapter 7.)

There is a widely held misconception that we are protected by privacy settings on social media sites. However, the terms of service (TOS) that you agreed to when you signed up in order to use a service such as Facebook is actually a contract between you and the social media site. I have read through the terms of service for a few of the social media sites and they very explicitly state in relatively non-legalese (clear English) what rights they have to your content, what information they can collect on you, and what they can do with that information. They also state very clearly that their privacy policy can change at any time.

According to the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.…

4. When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).³

When you agree to use Facebook, you are giving Facebook rights to your content. Even though it says that you own it, by posting it you are giving it a license to use the content. The worldwide license is also transferable to whomever Facebook chooses, meaning it can sell your data to whomever it wishes.

Nowhere in the TOS for Facebook (last revision date December 11, 2012) does it state that the people that you have chosen to share your content with do not have the right to reproduce and redistribute your content. In fact, according to item 4, quoted previously, if you use a public privacy setting on your content, you are allowing others to use your content and associate that content with you. There is much legal debate as to whether content posted to social media is copyrighted by the original creator. It depends on how the creator/writer has shared it (whom he or she has shared it with and what privacy settings), what the content is, and whether monetary value can be placed on the content (for example, if it is reproduced by a news organization or anyone else who then makes money off it). The lawyers can debate until they are blue in the face, and they probably will—the bottom line is, to protect yourself, it is best to not post anything that you would not want shared with the world.

On April 29th 2013, University of Georgia freshman Chelsea Chaney filed a lawsuit against the Fayette County Public School District in Georgia, claiming that school officials used an image in an Internet safety presentation that they used from her Facebook page without her permission. They used the photo of her in a bikini with a caption of Once It’s There—It’s There To Stay, implying that it was inappropriate to post the photo on Facebook.⁴

The outcome of this case could help determine who owns original content when it’s posted to social media.

The news is full of stories of people getting fired over things they’ve posted on social media. For example:

Lindsey Stone, a Plymouth, Massachusetts woman who posted a photo of herself giving the middle finger in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, creating a firestorm of Internet backlash and outrage, lost her job Wednesday.

Stone’s employer, Living Independently Forever, Inc., a non-profit based in Hyannis, announced that both Stone and the co-worker who took the photo were no longer working at the non-profit after thousands of people rallied for the pair to be removed from their jobs, saying what they did was disrespectful and offensive.⁵

The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.⁶ The First Amendment (the right to free speech) does not necessarily protect your free speech from the private sector. If you work for the private sector, you are most likely an at-will employee, meaning that it is at the company’s discretion whether or not to take disciplinary action against you for anything that you say or that you post online.

Regardless of whether or not you think that this is right or wrong or an invasion of privacy, if you are an at-will employee of the private sector, a private employer has the right to fire you or not hire you for anything that you have posted or any information discovered about you online. That said, not all social media content is created equal. For example, it is much more difficult to determine whether something as seemingly innocuous as liking something on Facebook could be considered cause for