Somewhere on the Eastern shore of Japan The other day I was quite irritated to learn that my Psycho Lady Hockey email address had been “hacked.” It’s not like this stuff never happens, that’s not what I’m annoyed with. What I find baffling is that usually the hacker has a clear purpose as to why they are breaking in, and this person did not. It looks like the activity went on for about 4 days, which only happened because, as many of you who have tried to contact me via this avenue have learned, I don’t check those emails more than once every 1-2 weeks or so. This person didn’t send out spam emails, or sabotage my inbox, instead (s)he opened the occasional email from my Junk folder, and then deleted the email so as to not get my attention. Now, what is the point of that? Please, if you know, tell me, because I can’t figure it out, and all the techiest people I know didn’t have a clue either. My theory was that in their infinite wisdom they assumed that opening a spam email would result in my Mac getting a virus. Only emails in an array of other languages were targeted. Hmm…
Well, like most things, this event got me thinking about hockey, and the malicious things people do with the Internet. In the hockey world, I’ve seen it all. The online rumours tend to be pretty vicious. There was this trolly old bag from the States that decided to spread a rumour that an NHL player had a restraining order against me. As far as I know this was after she saw me at said player’s game vs. her team, and was just gawking at me. She had never seen me in person, and her biggest argument against me prior to this incident was always that my Psycho Lady Hockey photos are airbrushed, and I don’t look like that in real life. Well, I hope I don’t look like that in real life because, truthfully, I almost cried when I saw the pictures for the first time because I thought I looked so bad. Anyway, I’m not sure if that was the day she started the rumour or not; it wouldn’t exactly make sense, you know. I’d probably be dragged out of the arena in handcuffs because I can only imagine that attending a game would be a violation of the order, eh? Rumours like that put me in a tough spot, and make me look quite unsavoury. If I went to a game, I’d look like a stalker, and if I didn’t go, I’d look like a criminally charged stalker. Quite the pickle; give a point to the cunty old hag for that one.
Other times people don’t just hide behind the internet to voice their cunty opinions, they hide behind sexy photos, and sometimes a new identity altogether. Back when Hurricane Katrina had devastated America, and my name was on every headline in North America, I had a series of hockey players reach out to me out of the blue. It was JUST hockey players that did this, and I really don’t know why. Must have something to do with the way they are wired, “Hurricane Katrina… wait a minute… I know a Katrina…”
Anyway, one of the players was especially funny. He was a pretty boy and he knew the ladies loved him. One day, after the hurricane, I happened to be in front of my PC when this guy logged into MSN. When his name popped up I saw he had some picture of a statue up as his display pic. “What is that?!” I thought, and decided to click it to take a look. Upon further inspection, I discovered that it was a picture of the Wayne Gretzky statue from up in Oil Country. Unfazed I closed the window, and went about my business. It couldn’t have been more than 20 seconds before he messaged me. I suppose it took him those 20 seconds to select the best display picture he had on file because Gretzky had vanished. Where the Great One had been, there was a half naked photo of the player in question, and mama liked. Of course, I was in my celibate phase, so I probably felt more threatened by this conversation, than excited. He would go on to do this a few more times before the offseason ended; always showing up online with some nondescript photo, then BAM, he’d message me, and one of his Chippendale-like photos would be all over my monitor. He was just doing what he did best. Dangle a carrot in front of a bunny, and see if she wanted to take a bite. I probably would have, if I hadn’t been so pure. That’s what Katrina means, after all; pure, that is. I remember finding it funny at the time, in a terrified virginal kind of way. I remember saying to one of my sorority sisters, a few weeks before the hurricane hit, and meteorologists hadn’t fully understood how severe the Hurricane was going to get, “Oh they made a big mistake naming the hurricane, Katrina. We’re crazy bitches. If Hurricane Katrina isn’t one of the fiercest storms of all time, I’ll be shocked.” Yep, I knew the storm would be a bad one, but I definitely didn’t expect it to start raining men.
Now I’m sure this all sounds like fun and games, and with the exception of the odd rumour that crosses the line, it’s usually just stupid shit. But what happens when things start getting creepy? I’ve always been curious about those guys that pretend to be NHL players online. I told you about the time a “Calgary Flame” tried to pick me up at one of my birthday celebrations. The thing he hadn’t banked on was that I both knew what Brandon Prust looked AND sounded like, and that he wasn’t him. That’s a little different, though, at least I could see this guy and knew what I was getting. On the Internet you have no idea who is lurking behind the picture of your favourite NHL star. I get it a lot on Facebook. I’d say at least daily someone using a player’s name will send me a friend request. Usually I never investigate these things; I just assume it’s a fan doing it out of something they’ve convinced themselves is respect and admiration. However, sometimes these impostors take it further, and send me a message keeping up the charade that they are the player they claim to be. Why just the other day “Vinny Lecavalier” was trying to proposition me.
Who are these people? That’s what I really want to know. Are they just some stupid kids trying to have fun, or are they some sort of legitimate online predator that will throw you into the back of an ice cream truck and rape you three times in the ass before his Klondike bar melts?
Back when Facebook was just getting off the ground, everyone in TO was all about social networks. UToronto was the first Canadian school on there, and back in those days, when ONLY university students could get in, it was way cooler. You could see the profile of anyone at your school, and anyone you had a common friend with. It was a creeper’s paradise. People used it as a dating service that didn’t have the stigma attached to it. And it was pretty safe because you needed an active university email address to sign up. You never knew when some hottie from campus was going to give you the Poke. I will admit I did end up making out with a guy from school a few times that I had met because he poked me randomly one day. Scandal! Anyway, at the time there was another Toronto-based social networking site that was pretty popular in the GTA, and a wannabe hockey player using it as his hunting grounds.
This guy had added me randomly one day. Again, he had a picture of “himself” topless, and at maximum smolder. He told me he played for the Guelph Storm. Sure he did. This was back in my Guelph Storm days, and I had no idea who he was. See, he wasn’t actually smart enough to use the name of someone on the team to validate his story. Anyway, one day I got a random message from a notorious GTA puck bunny. Back in those days, girls didn’t just know player stats, they knew puck bunny stats as well. So, she sends me this novel asking me if I know the guy. Obviously, I said no, and that he randomly added me, but that we had never met. She proceeds to tell me some harrowing story about how he had persuaded her to come to his house, and when she got there she quickly discovered that the picture he was using not his own, but that of an actual OHL player that played for the Barrie Colts, and that he was some 98 lbs weakling that was playing Junior Development. Apparently, after the incident he was so mad that she shot him down, so he sent her the link to my profile, and told her that he was fucking me and I was sooooo good. Well, as long as he’s saying it was good, right? LOL!
The story of the fake OHL player is not really disturbing. Just some kid trying to get laid, and not considering that when he manages to get a girl to meet him offline, she might actually take off because he isn’t the person she was expecting. The Ryan Smyth Cybersault is a little more unsettling.
One day, “Ryan Smyth” added me to MSN. Now this wasn’t just some fan, this person was flat out pretending to be Ryan Smyth. It disturbed me because I wasn’t sure if this was a planned stunt, or just a random, yet coincidental hit. Even back then, before Psycho Lady Hockey, everyone knew that I was all about the puck. I decided to investigate the account. I wasn’t attempting to hack into his account, but I just wanted to check out some of the details he had floating around in his security area, and get a better grasp on the intent. Usually, I’d just make up a random password, wait for the system to tell I got it wrong, and begin the process of resetting the password. Of course, I wasn’t trying to succeed in the reset, but during the process I’d be able to ascertain where the person was from.
So, I typed in his email address, and then tabbed over to the Password section. I typed in the first bullshit thing I could think of, 123456. Imagine my surprise when his inbox opened up in front of me. Well, the fact that he used 123456 as his password was validation enough that the account was fake, not that I needed validation on that. What I saw next sincerely rattled me. Email after email was sitting in his inbox from Lavalife and Facebook and other dating sites shutting down his accounts for reports of suspicious activity. This was a guy setting up fake profiles to lure women off the internet. This was an actual predator!
I was really disturbed by this finding. It was only a couple months since something similar happened to another one of my sorority sisters. It was reading week, and instead of going somewhere warm, or, you know, actually studying, we were planning on having an all out drink fest – a different club every night! That last Friday of classes, we were ready to kick things off. She had a 6 o’clock class, so I was anxiously waiting for her to get back to the chapter house, so we could pretty up and go. Her class was supposed to end at 9PM, and was only a 10 minute from the house, so by the time the clock struck 10, I was beginning to wonder what was up.
I started calling her, and she wasn’t picking up the phone. As it got later, and later, some of the other girls were starting to get worried, too. We left so many messages on her phone, we maxed out her inbox, then her phone was mysteriously turned off. It turned into an all out (wo)manhunt that night. A few of us ran around to the frat houses, and asked if anyone had seen her, and to keep an eye out. Nobody had. Sometime around 3AM, we gave up, but I’m sure I barely slept that night.
Around noon the next day, she showed up at the house in cab… from the hospital. Some guy had dropped her off at the Emergency, and bolted. She had been drugged, but the rape kit indicated that no sexual assault had taken place. Our theory is that it was his first time using date rape drugs, and that he freaked out when he saw them take effect. When her 6 o’clock class ended he was waiting for her outside of the building. They had connected on Lavalife, and he somehow convinced her to give him her class schedule even though he didn’t go to our school.
He used the “random encounter” as an excuse to ask her to go for a drink. She agreed to go for ONE because she had plans with me later. I guess that’s why he roofied on the first drink. My friend always jokes that only an idiot does that. She left her drink only once to hit the ladies room. How he managed to drop the thing, I’ll never know – they were sitting up at the bar. The last thing she remembers is stumbling while trying to walk out the door.
Her cell was left at the bar which made me so fucking livid. Instead of answering a phone that was frantically ringing off the hook all night, they just shut it off. Geez, asshole, maybe it’s the person calling trying to find their fucking phone! I wanted to go over there and give the owner an ear full of angry crazy girl, but she wouldn’t let me. If they had only picked up, we could have at least had some clue as to where she was. I was, at least, given permission to send Lavalife a scathing complaint about the incident. They responded that they can’t take any action unless there is police involvement. OK, leave an aspiring rapist in your network. They could have at least said they would suspend the account and look into it. Twitter suspends accounts for no reason at all ALL the time, as we all know. It didn’t matter anyway, the perp’s profile had already mysteriously disappeared.
I felt it was my duty to do something about the Ryan Smyth impersonator, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to shut down his account because then he’d just make a new one and he’d have free reign to rejoin all the sites that had already thrown him out. And how could I report him to any authority, I shouldn’t have accidentally “hacked” into his inbox in the first place. I decided to brainstorm before I acted, and logged out, but not before I checked out his registered address and learned that he only lived 10 minutes away from me.
A day or so later “Ryan Smyth” logged in and attempted to start talking to me. He went into this whole thing about how he was “Ryan Smyth” and all sorts of shit that I just couldn’t stand. Like really, did he actually think that I’d buy that THE Ryan Smyth, with his ungodly playoff beard of mass destruction, would actually be creeping me online? I laughed at him, and in the same breath logged him out of MSN. I meant it as a warning not to try any shit with me, and he reacted like the devil himself. He logged back in, “You think you’re fucking smart, don’t you, you fucking bitch.” And block. No joke, for the next 12 months he made account after account, usually with some type of sexually violent handle, and tried to “get me” through the Internet. What was wrong with this guy? And what would have happened if I had the IQ of a wannabe hockey wife, and actually went running at the opportunity to get with THE “Ryan Smyth?”
