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TEXT MESSAGES AND CALLER ID
With the advancement of technology, stalking has changed. Stalkers keep finding new ways to harass their victims. Currently, text messaging and emails are emerging as one of the most commonly used means of harassment. As police, we are constantly having to learn new ways to catch the tech-savvy stalker.
If you are receiving harassing text messages, or constant calls from an unknown caller, we can find out what phone it's coming from and who is the phone's subscriber. We do that through a subpoena to your cell phone provider to learn the number it's coming from. Then we can use the internet to find out what cell phone provider owns that phone number. We send another subpoena to the cell phone provider and voila! We know who owns the phone. Seems pretty simple, let's charge the owner with harassment... Whoa now, slow down, by now you should know that there is nothing simple in government and the justice system.
The problem we run into is that knowing who owns the phone doesn't prove that the owner is the one who called or sent the text message. We need additional evidence such as their voice leaving a message, or a witness who saw them send the text message. Any defensive attorney is going to bring up the fact that several people live in the house and could have sent the message, or they will argue that the suspect was telling his friends about your recent break up and then left his phone on the table when he stepped out for a smoke and one of his friends must have sent the message. Or, and this one is often true, the suspects new girlfriend is the jealous type and she is the one sending the messages in an effort to drive a deeper wedge between you and him.
You may also have difficulty convincing your detective to even find out who's phone the calls are coming from. It's not because your detective is lazy, most of us are hard workers who enjoy catching bad guys. The biggest obstacle we face is often our budget. Cell phone companies are in business to make money, and they do not pay their workers a salary so that the worker can give free services to the police. In truth, the phone company charges the police department for every subpoena they answer, and they believe that government has big budgets and should pay a lot for their services. Consequently, most police departments are not interested in paying the phone service provider to find out who owns a phone unless that knowledge is going to lead to charges.
Your police department may first require you to do what you can to end annoying phone calls and text messages before they will spend the money to subpoena the phone service provider. This usually entails changing your phone number. If you've changed your number and start getting the messages again on your new number, then your detective is going to see that it is a more serious problem and is more apt to convince his supervisor that the subpoenas are necessary.
If the only evidence
we have is an electronic signature such as text messages or caller ID, we need something more. A witness who saw him send the message
would be best. If you have some other evidence which helps to
authenticate the message, such as a voicemail in his voice where he
says something very similar to what is in the text, then that helps
show he was the one who sent it. For example, a lady brought me
voicemails where he said he would cut her head off and bury it in the
desert. She had text messages from his phone number which said the
same thing. When I combine his voice saying that, with the text message
saying the same thing, and both coming from the same phone number, then
I can present the text message as evidence.
So,
if all you have is text messages, your detective may say it's not
enough, but don't delete them. More evidence may later come up that
would turn them into stronger evidence.
EMAIL
To trace an email, we have to first have a complete copy of the email. This will provide a specific IP address for the computer that sent it. The IP address is not the senders email address HotMamaintheBahama@kookoo.com, it is a numerical address assigned to the sender at the time the email was sent.
That IP address changes every time they log on. To help you understand this I will give an example. Let's say you have internet service through your cable TV service. Your cable TV company may have 100,000 customers. They know that not every customer is going to be online at the same time, so they may only own 20,000 IP addresses. Every time you log on you are given one of those IP addresses. When you log off, that IP address is given to the next customer that logs on. The next time you log on you are given a totally different IP address. By checking the original email that you received, we can get the IP address that was used on the day and time that the email was sent. We may have to send a subpoena to your provider to get the senders IP address. A subpoena to the governing body for your continent will tell us who owns that IP address. A subpoena to the IP address holder can then provide us with the customer's account info that had that IP address at the exact time and date the email was sent.
Like with the text messages, the police department has now paid a lot of money in subpoenas to find out whose account sent the message. This still doesn't prove who actually sent it. It could have been sent by anyone the suspect claims was in his house at the time, or, if the account holder has a wireless router, it could have been accessed by any computer in the neighborhood. For this reason we still need a witness who saw the suspect send the email.
Again, if all we have is the email, then we don't have enough evidence to charge your stalker. However, don't delete the message because other evidence may come up later that can make the email more credible.
***If you delete an email or text message, don't expect that your provider can get it back for you. They don't usually save them. When you consider that 70 million teenagers are sending over a thousand text messages and emails each month, you realize the magnitude and expense of saving them.
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