EPISODE 47 - The Phone Stalker

She's going to reach up in the airplane , reach up to the cabin bin to get something out . You'll have to encourage her to wear something .

Oh god , we're just upset because we're all on the same page . Everyone's like , unsubscribe , unsubscribe , unlike . So this year on , my birthday is on the 11th of November . Lewis's birthday is on the 13th . So Lewis decided a couple of years ago that he wants to celebrate his birthday and my birthday on the 12th .

So now , forever more , my birthday will be on the 12th of November instead of the 11th . So this year there is actually a Patriots game on the 12th , and the time difference is normally way out , so I end up watching games until early hours of the morning . But on the 12th this year there's a game that's on at 2 o'clock in the afternoon .

So me and Lewis have said , after many questions of what do you want to do for your birthday , where do you want to go for your birthday , me and Lewis are going to have a Patriots day on the 12th of November . We're going to sit in the cinema room . We're going to watch the Patriots game . Have your corn dogs , have our corn dogs and our beers .

Yeah , it'll be good . Looking forward to that , oh .

Yeah , I was like you're pretty accurate there and it goes to grab for words and it just fucking misses Cycles right past them .

And then by that time , about half an hour has gone by , someone's been talking to me and I've been going listening to myself , going what was it ? What were you going to say ? Oh , do you remember the picture of that guinea pig the other day ? That was true , I love guinea pigs . And Claire goes do you want to or not ? And I go yeah , yes , I do .

And she's like really , and I'm like nothing , oh god , I'm too deep . I'm too deep , I'm like I don't know . What do you want to do ? That's you .

Music , music , music , music .

So February 2007 , three families were living in a quiet suburb of Washington and they started to receive strange phone calls from an unknown source . They all started with the Kirk and Dale family , 16 year old Courtney Kirk and Dale's phone started acting weird .

It had been sending text messages to her friends of its own free will just one single word , and it was clearly meant to be derogatory , and it was sent to a few of Courtney's friends . What word ?

But Courtney was like I didn't send that . She was so confused by it and she went through a text log and realized that it had been sent to a few different people and she hadn't done it . She had not sent that message . But things very quickly took a much darker turn .

After the strange text message incident , courtney started to receive a barrage of phone calls from somebody with a scratchy voice . Every day , declarations of hatred and threats of murderous intent were coming in at all hours of the day and night .

One day Courtney received a phone call simply saying I know where you are , I know where you are , I know where you are .

And , as if that wasn't terrifying enough , after deciding that she wouldn't answer her phone anymore so she'd be receiving these phone calls all the time , you know , answering it like hello and receiving all these death threats and things , she thought I'm not gonna answer my phone anymore and she ignored all the calls and she ignored the voicemails and she ignored the

texts . Her phone rang one day and instead of the like upbeat chirpy ringtone that she was used to hearing . The ringtone had been changed to the caller's voice saying over and over Aim to defend , aim to defend , aim to defend . I'm just creepy in it , the death threats started to escalate .

The caller was now promising to slit the entire family's throat , kill the family's pets . The caller even said that they would kill her grandparents . And they named these people . So they named the family members , they named the family pets and they named the grandparents .

And it wasn't long before Courtney's mum , heather , started receiving very similar calls and texts . Along with the calls , the family were now also hearing banging and knocking on their doors and windows . At night , the family would sit like huddled together in the front room .

They would hear this banging and this knocking and they would phone the police and they would just sit huddled together waiting for the police to arrive . But the noise always stopped before the police got there . There was never anybody there . The police never found anybody , so they didn't know .

You know , was the caller just stalking their phones or was he watching the house ? Was he ? Did he know where they all lived , and so they just had no idea . But they soon got their answer when they calls and text messages started describing in great detail what they were wearing and what they were doing .

The caller also seemed to know who was in the house at the time . The family started to grow very fearful and went to the police , but the police were like the uh that I don't know .

They , you know , they knew that you could stalk people and , uh , you know the havin' garage and phone because yeah , exactly , but not to the extent of what was going on . So they advised the family to change phones , change phone numbers , change phone providers .

Um , the family also started covering the cameras on their phones with tape in case the caller was spying on them that way . So do you remember when webcams were a quite a massive thing and everybody started covering their webcams ? Yeah , in case people could see through them . I can't see you anymore .

So , yeah , they started covering the cameras in case he was using the cameras to spy on the family . So the family also took to turning off their phones at night or , you know , when they wasn't using them , or anything like that .

Um , but what was happening was that they would turn their phones off , but then the phones would turn back on a few minutes later . So they just had no control over their phones . How is that even possible ?

But horrifyingly , once the new system had been installed , heather received a voicemail from the caller bragging about knowing the code to arm and disarm the new system , and he left the voicemail and he told it what the code was . He knew absolutely everything and soon after this , two neighbouring families began to receive the same calls .

Now , one of the neighbours was a relative of the Kirkandale family and the other neighbour was Courtney's best friend , taylor McKay , and her family . So Taylor McKay soon became another victim of this caller and she would receive just as much harassment as Courtney had . Because of how the name appeared on the screen all the time the caller .

They actually gave him the nickname of restricted because whenever it would call up , that's how it would show come up as restricted . So whenever they spoke about him in conversation , it was always oh , restricted called , restricted said this , restricted said that . So that's how they always referred to him .

And not only were the three families now receiving threatening phone calls , they also were receiving voicemails of , like they were recordings of their day to day conversations . So they would be sitting in the family room having a conversation and then somebody's phone would go off and the voicemail would play the conversation that they just had .

They just had , yeah , and there was even a voicemail left which was a recording of the conversation the Kirkandales had with the police officer at the station . So when they went to the station to report what was going on , that had been recorded and then sent to them and it was almost like a threat , like don't go to the police type threat .

And a terrifying call came in one day to the McKay family . Andrea McKay , who is Taylor's mother , said that while her kids were in school , restricted , called her and said he said there will be a shooting today at the school , so don't send your kids , they will be dead , so dead , oh my God .

So she immediately got in touch with the school to make sure that her children were safe and thankfully nothing happened . There was no , you know , shooting at the school . But in an interview later on Andrea actually said that from that call on words her level of fear went from . You know this , this is such a pain . This is a little bit inconvenient .

But I'll tell you what .

So they Because , if you're not , fuming enough .

So she figured that if both girls were primarily the targets , courtney and Taylor were pretty much constantly getting these phone calls and you know , it did affect the other family members , but not nearly as much as it was affecting Courtney and Taylor , right ? So Question Of course you can .

So what she'd done was she scheduled a meeting with the head teacher to kind of keep her in the loop and tell her what was happening and , just you know , see if anything would come out of it , if anything could be done .

She sat down at the table with Taylor , turned both of their phones turned off , placed them face up on the table , and while Andrea was explaining to the head teacher about these calls , about the strange behaviour that the phone was having , about the stalking and you know everything else that was going on , both of their phones powered back on and Andrea's phone

buzzed shortly after it turned back on and it received a text message from Taylor's phone that had been turned off . What so ? He was able to access their phones even when they were powered down .

The head decided to go back to the police after her daughter , courtney , had been babysitting one evening and she had received a call from restricted and she answered it , and the caller began to describe what she was wearing , where she was . You know the exact location where she was who's and who was in the house with her .

Nope , she quickly hung up the phone and , like , looked about . She looked out the windows , you know if anybody can see who's in the house with her , and they must be close by . So she kind of had a little search about but she didn't find anything . And the police still had no idea how the stalker was able to do what he was doing .

They , they knew if phone hacking they'd encountered that before . They knew stalking they'd encountered that before . But this was just like a completely on a different level . So the police contacted the cell providers to see if they could get a better understanding of how this would work . But they were also perplexed , completely baffled by what they was being told .

They actually said that , to their knowledge , what the family claimed was happening to them was impossible . They said to the police that the technology to do what was being done just didn't exist .

I think they were able to get eight search warrants for the family and their home , but they turned up nothing . They didn't find anything . They went through the phones and , you know , found all the text messages and voice mails and things .

Yeah , yeah , I guess .

And he spent over 50 work hours trying to locate restricted and trying to find out where it was coming from , and he also found nothing .

So FBI investigators were contacted and surveillance experts within the FBI told the police that hackers actually would have no trouble doing what restricted had been doing , and they said that it's actually incredibly easy to spoof a phone number . Now , for those of you that don't do this , because hopefully that's , everyone yeah .

You shouldn't know what spoofing is , but I had no idea . So spoofing is when the caller ID displays on the phone from it looks like it's coming from a different location .

Yeah , so I mean , you've probably had it and I've had it where a mobile number will ring and you answer it and it's clearly a business or you know somebody trying to sell you something , and they're not doing it off a mobile phone . You can tell that . So that is what spoofing is .

It basically redirects where it's coming from , and they said that that's quite an easy thing to do . So , despite it being easy enough to do , they said that it was virtually impossible to trace where the spoof number was actually coming from . So they will trace it back to wherever it had been spoofed to , but not the actual regional location .

But they can't do a reverse spoof . They can't do a reverse spoof . No , they cannot . The technology for that does not exist in 2007 . Reverse spoofing technology . So they believe that Kourtney's phone number had been spoofed and that's why all the phone calls and texts and things were coming back to her .

That doesn't , however , explain how the phones powered on by themselves , how Courtney's ring tone had been changed . You know , any of the other strange things that had been going on . But the FBI surveillance team believed that Courtney's phone had been infected with a virus .

Now this virus was called the roving bug and this was a technology that the FBI had already been using and they used it to keep tabs on mob bosses and to gather evidence of you know deals and things like that that were going on before they made an arrest . So they was quite aware of how this would happen .

So when the roving bug is installed on a phone , the phone can then be accessed remotely , so without any need for physical access , and whether the phone is on or not . That would then explain how texts were being sent when the phone was off and you know these sort of things .

But what they couldn't understand is why a 16 year old girl's phone would be infected with this bug . It was a cutting edge technology at the time and it was only being used by the FBI .

And also it didn't explain why the stalking continued after Courtney got a new phone and got a new phone number , because the bug would have been the phone that she had was the one that was infected . So one theory is that Courtney had downloaded a polyphonic ringtone from Myspace and it was that ringtone that had the virus .

So do you remember when you polyphonic ringtones were the best and you used to get magazines and create ?

So he would then have her mum's number , her dad's number , her family member's number who lived next door , her best friend's number who lived opposite .

Damn you , experts have suggested that the caller would have needed expert technology skills and a whole range of different hacking techniques in order to accomplish what was being done .

So had the , you know , the roving bug is one theory that the court and his phone was infected with that , but it doesn't explain some of the other things that were going on , you know , but why she changed phones three times and still infected . Another theory is that he was an expert hacker , absolutely expert , no-transcript .

That also didn't explain why it targeted Courtney and they assumed that it was a teenage boy that had some sort of vendetta , and most teenage boys wouldn't have that level of technological expertise or hacking equipment or you know anything like that . Was it all a hoax ?

Was it cutting edge technology used by the FBI that somehow found its way onto Courtney's phone ? Yeah , how was the microphone accessed and able to record their conversations ?

They was quite adamant that it was not Courtney that had done all of these things .

You know , ringtone had been changed to the creepy , creepy voice and there's quite a few theories online and one of the theories was that , you know , she just started it as a joke and then it got a little bit out of hand , so then she tried to kind of blow it out of proportion to make it look like it wasn't her or something like that .

But yeah , there's just a lot that doesn't add up . But yeah , the case remains completely unsolved this day and nobody knows who it was or why it was or how it happened .

I can't remember what it was bloody called because I can never remember the Watcher . So it's very similar to that in that , but obviously that was done by a post .