A Long Island woman, stalked, bullied and attacked by an aggressor on the Internet is speaking out about why it’s not always easy to catch your cyber stalker.
"She created a Facebook account with my work profile pic and wrote horrendous things," Lisa Michelle Kucharz told the I-Team. "She wrote I was a pedophile, that I was a prostitute, all of these lies."
Kucharz -- a social media expert who teaches college courses on new media -- tried to block her stalker but almost immediately, she would create a new alias. On one social media platform, Kucharz says she counted more than three dozen names by the same person.
When the cyber stalking turned into actual stalking, Kucharz knew she had to involve police.
"I got an alert that something was posted about me," said Kucharz. "I saw the blog and I read about how she followed me into the park. She said she was following me around New York and was going to pop out at any time and harm me."
"I was scared," Kucharz admitted. "I felt hopeless. Every day I was devastated. I felt humiliated."
Kucharz reported this to Nassau County police, who began to investigate. But once they learned her stalker was from Canada, they suggested she try police there. But she decided to take matters into her own hands, hiring Bruce Anderson, a private investigator who specializes in cases like Kucharz's for Cyber Investigation Services in Florida.
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"When she called me, she was just totally distraught," said Anderson.
Looking at all the aliases, Anderson came up with a suspect. He says the first step is to connect the content to the user.
"We are looking for an IP address, internet protocol address,”said Anderson. "That ties back to that person of both the bad guy and the known suspect.”
So Anderson said they sent a message to her suspected stalker disguised as what’s called "click bait" -- a picture, story link, or even an entire website -- used to attract a user and compel them to click.
"From that, we got her internet protocol address, the device type and all of this evidence can be utilized in court," Anderson said.
Anderson discovered Kucharz’s cyber bully was Dion Tyson. Tyson had started to see a man Kucharz once dated.
"She lashed out at me because she thought I was still in a relationship with him,"said Kucharz.
They brought the information to a Canadian detective and months later, Tyson was arrested for criminal harassment and later pleaded guilty.
In court documents the judge called this "the most egregious form of posting that I have had the misfortune to review" and sentenced Tyson to six months in jail.
Tyson’s attorney declined to comment for our story, but court documents showed Tyson apologized to Kucharz and said she was also the victim of cyber bullying.
While this chapter is closed, Kucharz says her nightmare is far from over.
"If you were to search me on the Internet, some of the negative content will still come up," she said. "I requested these things be removed, but that wasn’t granted as part of the sentence."
