LinkedIn Protects a Stalker

Since 2008, my wife and I have been pursued by a stalker. He’s called our employers, colleagues, schools, and anyone else he could talk to and spread slander about us. These calls caused our family direct harm in a few ways. We only discovered this in 2012 after several years of “mystery callers” to our contacts. It’s a long story, but it’s not for this blog. (If anyone is interested, the court filings are a matter of public record.)

What I want to write about is how hard it is to get the authorities to take these crimes seriously and how even private companies protect evildoers for the sake of the privacy (of the criminal).

Although we tried, no one at the police station took our claims seriously. A violated restraining order was put in front of the courts, and the judge dismissed it on a technicality she herself created.

But that’s the public system. Those police have to fight murderers and rapists every day. The courts see all kinds of crazy things. So, when people accuse a man of stalking them via telephone calls, I understand that nobody really cares that the law is violated. It isn’t right, but it's reality.

I didn’t expect LinkedIn to take such a pro- stalker approach. I would think they would want to protect their real members from harm. But maybe they are just asleep at the switch?

Here’s what happened:

On the same day, my wife and I received invitations to “Link-In” with someone named Green who works at Shell in Whitewater, Wisconsin. “Mr. Green” had attended a University in Aberdeen in the UK. The requests were kind of strange because neither my wife nor I have ever studied in the UK, been to Wisconsin, or worked in the Petroleum industry. We had already discovered that our stalker had previously used LinkedIn to try to “link” with other family members and friends through various sources, attempting to leverage those connections to gather employment and personal information about us. He uses multiple personas, races, and pictures to do so.

I contacted LinkedIn, told them the story in brief, and asked them to reveal the email address of “Mr. Green”. They declined because they could violate HIS privacy. He reached out to me and my wife on the same day, not us to him. We strongly suspect a stalker, and HIS privacy is inviolate.

To LinkedIn’s credit, they did respond with some ways that I could block “Mr. Green” from contacting me again. And, they gave me a chance to make a “formal request”- whatever that means. Of course, these are totally unhelpful to me, as our “Mr. Green” will simply create a new persona, picture, background, fake LinkedIn profile, and try again. But at least somebody at LinkedIn feels they are protecting their members, but perhaps not the right ones.

Avrum Aaron

US-Israeli Lawyer

avrum@lop-llc.com

054-398-4380