Dear Angry Driver,

I understand you’re not a Morning Person, but perhaps you should get in your early dose of hugs or something (though maybe not caffeine, judging by the way you were about to plow down that poor crossing guard as he was trying to help the young girl cross the street) so that you can resist the urge to kill the rest of us. Alternatively, trying public transportation or punching bags might also be a good idea. It would be much appreciated. <3

Sincerely,
Concerned Fellow Autoist

For the longest time, I have been struggling with whether or not to post this, because the last thing I want to do with an obsessive online stalker is to give him more attention, but it’s really gone on for far too long and I refuse to be a passive victim. Since February of this year, someone going by Gregory Leroy and/or Weaver who supposedly resides in Texas has been harassing me (and other females too, it seems) online and the local cyber unit of the police along with his web host have been of no help. His latest actions involve buying the domain of my first name and last name (eleachang.com) and optimizing it so to have it take over my Google search results.

To start from the beginning, Gregory apparently found me via the footer credits for Women 2.0, a nonprofit organization that I used to do web maintenance work for, and for some reason became fixated. I couldn’t make heads or tails of his nonsensical first email message (included at the end of the post) and ignored it, but he persisted by continually sending me messages through email in addition to social networking sites, like LinkedIn and then Twitter, though he clearly realized at some point that I blocked him (which also kept me from noticing all the tweets he was trying to send my way for awhile) and eventually ended up deleting the majority of his posts.

All the while, I had been hoping that he would simply move on, since he seemed more mentally unbalanced than malicious, but once he set up the domain under my name, the comments he included in the source code (along with the whole site itself) were unnerving:

I’m not going to leave this [source] up! We must never let in-essence.org be anything less than the essence of in-essence.org. That means that we must 404 eleachang.com so nobody else can 200 it! Does that make any sense? (Well, we can also 403 it and 302 a list of hip and useful subdomains)

And since we can put HTML in our Forbidden 403…
not yet Elea, its unforbidden 4now — I get to nudge you at least once

- elea

PLEASE REMEMBER, I’M AN ARTIST AND I’M SENSITIVE

And also remember, I play around with all types of people and or.ganizations

Finally, after Gregory sent along a screenshot of eleachang.com rising in my Google search results, I broke my silence and responded.

Gregory,

I am not sure who you are or why you keep sending me messages through various mediums. I am even more unsure as to why you’ve bought the domain of my name. When I blocked you on Twitter, it should have been clear that I would rather not correspond with you.

Whatever your aim is with these actions, please stop. I will not respond to future correspondences, but I will be pursuing further legal action as necessary.

Elea

This seemed to get through to him:

Elea I’m very sorry for bothering you and I promise this is my last message to you. Please understand that I never wanted you to feel uncomfortable and I am sorry about taking your domain. I will send you the transfer code soon, if you would like. I just wanted to be your friend from Austin and I realize I did a poor job of introducing myself. Don’t hate me for being a weirdo.

Weaver

However, the domain is still up right now, he still comes to comment on my blog posts, and he continued working on the SEO of eleachang.com to get it to become the top result under my name. I shouldn’t be surprised though, as he seems also to be a pathological liar, judging by the way he liked to make up stories about me. So now I’m exposing his actions and asking you all for suggestions regarding what my next steps should be. Online stalking may still be a murky area legally, but I should not have to feel powerless.

Read on »