Make New York Post a Preferred Source A jilted psycho stalker turned his ex’s home into a horror movie — flashing lights in her room, turning her TV on and off and tracking her every move.
Smart technology has made our lives more convenient, but the interconnectedness of gadgets leaves people especially vulnerable, according to security experts.
A victim who spoke to The Post said she came home from a European trip to receive news of a seemingly thoughtful gesture from the guy she was dating.
“He told me that I now have a smart house. I loved the idea of controlling lights and my stereo speakers remotely, through my phone,” said the victim, who works in “the creative side of fashion, luxury retail and beauty,” and only wanted to be identified by her initials, AM, for reasons of privacy.
When the divorcee broke up with her suitor, he turned the tech against her.
“There were GPS trackers in my car,” she remembered, referring to widely available devices which connect to phones and are mostly used for tracking luggage. “At home, he messed with the lights, dimming them at random times, and switching off the TV when my daughter was watching. After the fact I realized that I was 100-percent targeted.”
The stalker was also inside his victim’s computer cloud and knew her every move, from the buying of airline tickets to who she was emailing.
“He employed multiple apps that I didn’t even know existed. And he also had people following me in other countries.
“He wanted to ruin my business. He got into my contacts and changed the names of people. A high-level creative director I deal with was put under the name of my babysitter. So, I think I am calling the babysitter, but I am actually calling a creative director.
“He was trying to make me look crazy. My Rolodex is my currency, and my network is my net worth. He was trying to destroy all of that,” she said.
The victim has filed a police report with Connecticut authorities and they said the investigation into the ex, who has not been arrested, is ongoing.
“He knew he could paralyze me and take me down. He used to say. ‘Don’t f–k with me.’ I was scared. But I had no idea he could control me from afar.”
Steven S. Stern, principal of Safe Harbor Advisory, was engaged by the victim — who is “now on my fourth iPhone” as she tries to navigate her ordeal — to help overcome the stalking nightmare. He confirmed to The Post he had found invasive spyware on her devices.
“The use of technology has become so sophisticated and almost impossible to defend against for a normal person,” Stern said. “They gain access to your phone, your computer, and they’re in your house.”
Cybercrime and technology-aided stalking are on the rise across the US.
Aine O’Neill, a TV host from Ireland who had relocated to California, also fell victim to a stalker using tracking tags on her car. She even scrapped the vehicle in her bid to get free of them and said she ultimately had to leave Los Angeles, heading back to Ireland, to keep living a normal life. Her stalker has not publicly been identified.
In another case in June of this year, New Yorker Anthony Belford was arraigned and charged with cyberstalking. His grotesque gambit? Allegedly posting AI-generated nudes of a woman against whom, feds claim, he had “allegedly waged a lengthy online campaign, hiding behind spoofed social media and email accounts … to cause substantial distress to his victim.” He has yet to enter a plea in his case.
Then there was Brett Michael Dadig, a social media influencer who billed himself as “God’s assassin” and used ChatGPT as his therapist while he stalked 11 women. According to Trib Live in Pennsylvania, he pleaded guilty to the crime, which was not facilitated by AI, although, he claimed that in his mind the technology had told him his deviant actions were a plan from God.
In the event that people’s accounts with AI companies and their chatbots get hacked, criminals can steal deeply intimate information.
“If they can get into your AI, they can see all the personal things you are putting in there,” Rachel Talley, a principal at Safe Harbor, told The Post. “They can come at you psychologically as opposed to just physically or technologically.”
Talley knows the pain because she personally experienced it. “I had a stalker who broke into my home when I was sleeping and used my thumbprint [on her cell phone] to get into my accounts,” she recalled. “He would send messages to people I knew and then block them when they responded. It was traumatizing. Complete and utter chaos.”
