Unfortunately, there are many options available to the psychopath who is focused on the assassination of your character via the Internet. This is commonly referred to as cyberbullying (or a variety of other cyber-related criminal activity), internet fraud, social media harassment, online exploitation or toxic computer stalking by these electronic predators.
Before the creation of the World Wide Web, it was much more of a challenge to produce propaganda against innocent victims, now it is as easy as filling out a form online, and pressing a submit button… and the results can be devastating to their victims.
Certainly, most people view information on the Internet with a cautious sense of curiosity. As we all know, you can’t believe everything you find in Google. Right? But, the psychopath armed with the intent to do irreparable damage to your reputation can cause so much of a clatter amongst the Internet-savvy to effectively trash you, or even rally an online mob against you.
We’ve seen it all, everything from posting a bunch of lies, half-truths, libel and slanderous reports in a way to make it look, “official,” via personal web sites, blogs, comment postings, and third-party web sites that may appear to be credible, to fraudulently impersonating victims on social media sites, like facebook and twitter and accosting your social media contacts with slanderous reports and/or threats.
Let’s face it, you can create anything you want on the Internet. It is an incredible resource when this power is used for good, but massively more powerful when used as a weapon against an individual; mostly due to the fact that the average web-surfing American loves drama. If they think they can use Google to uncover hidden dirty laundry on you, they will have feel like they’ve hit the mother-lode. And that – no matter how you try to defend yourself – can tarnish your image or reputation forever, because there will always be that seed of doubt amongst the conspiracy theorists.
For instance, let’s simulate a psychopath’s attack on you. In this scenario, let’s say that you maybe testified for the State against a psychopath and that your testimony led to his conviction and imprisonment. This causes the psychopath to focus all his energies on you as the reason that he is now behind bars – not that he committed crimes that landed him there – but you become his fixated target.
He (or she) is hell-bent to take you down, once and for all. You will pay the price for his/her transgressions.
In an attempt to destroy your credibility a psychopath may project his (or her) character attributes onto you in an effort to make him/her out to be the real victim, and possibly that the offender was framed by you, who exchanged your testimony for favors from the Court (or some other conspiracy).
The psychopath will take any known facts about you and turn them into wild stories that would excited the senses of any conspiracy theorist. For example,
| Fact | Psychopath Spin |
| You graduated from Harvard | you never attended and your credentials are fake |
| You married at an early age | unwed pregnancy and illicit drug use forced you to marry |
| You bought a new car | because the old car had DNA evidence of your murder victim |
| You own your home | you swindled some retiree out of their home |
| You vacationed in Vegas | you were laundering money for the mob |
| You were divorced | your spouse left you for infidelity |
| Your children are adults | they are finally free from your (possibly sexual) abuse |
| Your dog died | you killed your dog only after torturing it |
| Your friends love you | only because they don’t’ know the truth about you |
And so it goes, ad infinitum… Psychopaths are supremely gifted in spinning fantastic stories about their victims in an effort to destroy any sense of credibility that they may have.
Imagine applying for a job, and potential employers find these libelous reports on the Internet. What about getting phone calls from your friends, who tell you that they have received facebook messages, or even phone calls, from (supposed) public agencies investigating you for illicit or illegal activities?
Using the old-fashioned phone – or more correctly the evolutionary cell phone – is still a primary tool for the obsessive psychopath, especially due to new technologies including (but not limited to) “spoofing” caller ID information, so that caller ID enabled phones will see the phone number of the local police department, or FBI office on their call display; this is only one of the many new technological advancements that find themselves in the psychopath’s tool belt.
Who wins?
Avoid any contact with any potential psychopath via early detection. If it’s too late for that, stop any contact with your psychopath immediately and permanently. If you’ve already been targeted by a psychopath, ignore them as much as you can, as any response from you – in your defense or not – will chalk up a perceived “point” for the psycho. This will continue to fuel the fire.
Sometimes, if you are really good at ignoring the psychopath, they take it to the next level by attacking you through your friends, their friends, your associates and/or the media.
Hopefully, you can encourage them to document everything and not to fuel the fire by responding to the psychopath’s assaults in any way, but if they do, it will encourage the psychopath to push that target market even harder.
If you think that prosecution and imprisonment of a psychopath for committing cybercrimes will protect you; think again. We’ve seen these same crimes continue after the offender has been incarcerated via evil minions orchestrated and directed by the offender from behind bars.