The story behind this took place just over a year ago and involved a friend of mine (we’ll call him “Bob”) and a girl that was interested in him, a little too interested in fact (we’ll call her “Jane”). The back story here goes something like this:
Bob had met Jane at a local club and they had been hanging out for a few weeks. Jane, upon meeting Bob had warned him that she had a crazy ex-boyfriend who was still fired up about their breakup a few months prior. Bob, being a fairly secure kind of guy, really wasn’t too worried about the crazy ex, however, he wondered why the ex would be so angry, and Jane seemed so nice. Well, as it would come to pass, Jane wasn’t really as nice as she seemed, in fact, Jane turned out to be pretty crazy herself. A few weeks into getting to know one another, Jane started telling Bob that she was receiving threatening phone calls from her ex. A few nights every week, she would call Bob and inform him that her ex was actually outside her house waiting for her. Bob started to become concerned with the situation. A few more things transpired over the next couple weeks and then one night, Bob received an instant message from another one of Jane’s screen names, the person on the other end claimed to be Jane’s crazy ex. After a brief conversation, the screen name mysteriously signed off. This conversation other than being completely random set off a red flag; Bob noticed that the grammar and style of writing that Jane’s ex used was incredibly similar to Jane’s. He showed this to me and I was also immediately suspicious. Bob confronted Jane the next day about the conversation. Jane informed Bob that her ex had hacked into her other AIM account and was now in control of it. She told Bob that she had set up a new screen name and that Bob should just ignore her other one from now on.
Bob and Jane hung out once more, and during this time, he noticed a few more oddities, when Jane claimed that she was receiving a call from her ex, there was never anyone on the other end, no actual call was received. Finally one night after hearing this entire story from Bob and looking at all the evidence, we came to the conclusion that while this ex boyfriend may exist, he certainly wasn’t chasing after Jane like she claimed, nor was he threatening her. In fact, Jane’s ex was at college a few hours away and after contacting him we learned that he doesn’t even speak to her anymore. At this point, we decided that something had to be done to prove what was going on so that Bob could confront Jane about everything. The instant messages from Jane’s “ex” continued, so one night I decided that the easiest way to find out who was really on the other end would be to do some IP tracking. This is where the point behind this whole story finally takes shape. IP tracking can be accomplished fairly simply using a few different methods. We decided to setup two different small web pages that contained really nothing at all but code for a visitor tracking service and a redirection script. This would allow us to send a link to each of the screen names, Jane’s and her “ex”. Once each of them clicked on a link that we provided, they would be quickly passed through our tracking site and then redirected to an actual website somewhere else. We just had to hope that we could convince both of them to click on the links. We got everything setup using an account that I held with a popular hit tracking service and some code that I found pretty quickly by googling for “html redirect”. We sent a link to each of the screen names; please note that this was a different link, so as not to arouse too much suspicion. Then, we waited. Jane clicked on the link almost immediately, which registered on the tracking service within a few seconds. The “ex” was a little more reluctant, but rightly so, he had to be on guard. After a few more minutes, he finally clicked on the link as well. I refreshed my page and what we saw before us on the tracker page both confirmed our mounting suspicion and shocked us, Jane had been posing as her “ex” the entire time.
Now, we never really figured out why she did this, but if you were to read the scripts of some of the conversations where she was posing as the ex, you’d wonder how someone could be so crazy. While this particular incident didn’t really escalate past Bob and Jane no longer speaking, if it had, the use of IP tracking could have been vital evidence in proving what was really going on.
Share This
