Andy Wells reporting for Yahoo News writes, “‘Poisonous’ woman created 30 fake profiles to get innocent ex-boyfriend arrested”.
Not just arrested, but arrested six times.
A “poisonous” woman who sent herself threats from fake Instagram accounts she created to get her ex-boyfriend arrested has been jailed.
Courtney Ireland-Ainsworth, 20, created up to 30 false profiles, then told police her ex Louis Jolly was behind “vile” messages.
“Cunning” Ireland-Ainsworth reported him for supposedly threatening to stab her and warning: “She is getting a f***ing blade in her chest.”
She made 10 police statements claiming Mr Jolly was harassing and stalking her, leading to him being arrested six times and spending 81 hours in custody, including being remanded overnight.
He was charged with assault and stalking, hit with a stalking protection order, bailed on a home curfew with an electronic tag, and lost his job.
At Liverpool Crown Court, recorder Ian Harris told Ireland-Ainsworth: “You created an entirely fictional but superficially credible web of poisonous deceit for over five months.”
The report of the case in the Times says,
Her web of lies was uncovered after detectives requested user data from Facebook, which owns Instagram. When the information eventually came back, it showed that at least 17 accounts had been created using two of Ireland-Ainsworth’s email addresses, as well as IP addresses connected to her home and mobile telephone.
I know almost nothing about Instagram. Is there some factor I am failing to understand about the legal or practical ability of law enforcers to uncover who wrote a given Instagram post? Because the big selling point of the subservience of social media companies to the authorities is meant to be that the police can use their power to snoop to catch criminals, yet it took the police five whole months to uncover that Ireland-Ainsworth sent these messages herself. If Instagram does allow the authorities to check who wrote a message, why did the police not do so as soon as Louis Jolly denied having written them, rather than after arresting him six times? If Instagram does not allow the authorities to check who wrote a message, good for them, but in that case the existence of an Instagram message purporting to come from a person cannot incriminate them.
I would normally say that there is nothing worse than a surveillance state. Maybe I was wrong. A state that is #weseeyou for people displaying wrongthink but #believeallwomen for cases like that of Courtney Ireland-Ainsworth might be worse.
The fact that the man was arrested six times might surely, had police offices an ounce of common sense, have set off alarm bells. Maybe they did.
It does seem odd. Anyway, in this case justice appears to have been done. I wonder what happens when criminals are released in terms of their ability to start up a new profile? I am guessing that as a condition of parole, they have to behave.
It depends on how technologically savvy the poster is. A combination of VPN, Onion Routing (TOR) and a bit of being not incredibly stupid (using an email address tied to you) would make it nearly impossible to “prove beyond a shadow of a doubt”.
The thing is that the Police have to think that they *need to look*. It is common to the point of routine that males will harass, stalk and get violent with their ex-girlfriends, so for someone who deals with this daily, having it *not* be the case is the more rare situation. Thus it had to get to the point of absurdity before the police even thought they needed to look.
In the words of Marion Barry, “I was set up!”
IDK about the EU, but in the US, they’ll only do that with a court order.
Which might make it slow, especially if the police don’t really want to believe the accused and drag their feet about bothering to ask a judge for one.
(As Mr. O’Blivion says, anyone with any idea of cybersecurity skills can trivially hide that from a casual search.
But fortunately, well, just as most physical crimes are committed by idiots with poor impulse control, most cybercrime like this is committed by idiots with poor impulse control and no idea how to hide themselves.)
@William
This may be true for your average IT-illiterate plod, who may indeed view filling in forms for a court order / search warrant as a pain in the proverbial.
But for those that already have access to web servers and the web session logs, users with a TOR browser stand out like a flashing red light. As the IP addresses of the TOR routing servers are quite well known, and a TOR browser has a fairly distinctive fingerprint (user agent string). It would be farily simple (in terms of traffic analysis) to generate alerts and session log matching on traffic like that.
I would expect Instagram, WhatsApp and FaecesBerg to do this internally fairly easily and routinely, as part of the profiling they do on us all anyway. The barrier for most Public Agencies (who might like to get hold of the private data) is “Data Privacy” rules. That is, unless you happen to be with one of the TLA’s that help setup FaecesBerg in the first place.
This strikes me as a good reason for as many of us as possible to set up a TOR browser and turn it on occasionally.
But
Apparently Plod are unable to get to grips with those responsible for mass abuse of children in Rotherham/Oldham/Bradford/Leeds/Oxford/Bristol……
Obviously the miscreants have superior IT skillz
She got 10 months.
10 months.
And from the report, it sounds like her mum was a co-conspirator and got off scott-free.
The police probably didn’t get suspicious until the third or fourth account. Then they would have needed to get a court order and probably more than one since once they;d got the details from instagram they’d need the IP address details from the ISP and email details from whatever email provider was used in order to tie the case together.
While having the relevant techie pull the records is a 5 minute job, the crossing of ts and dotting of is to make sure that only the relevant data is released woud definitely take time. That’s mostly a good thing in terms of privacy
Still the woman was incredibly stupid since – at least according to the reports – she didn’t make any attempt to disguise her origins when creating and posting to these fake accounts. Mind you she probably would still have been caught, even ransomware mastercriminals screw up from time to time because while it is possible to evade surveillance but it takes considerable planning, an understanding of how you can be tracked and extreme care to make sure that you don’t accidentally give away identifying data by mistake.
‘ If Instagram does allow the authorities to check who wrote a message, why did the police not do so as soon as Louis Jolly denied having written them…’
Because the witches, hags and lesbians in the Feminista Coven insist Man bad, Woman good, Man always liar, Woman always truthful.
Woman must ALWAYS be believed – and so the gutless goons in police and elsewhere knuckle under for fear of being screeched and hissed at.
I think the exact quote was “Bitch set me up!” lol
@Rudulph: However, an evil stalker harasser ex would have as much reason to cover their footprints using TOR et al as the framing self-abuser; “You can’t prove nuffink, copper.” Indeed if said self-abuser maintained the only person with any motive to attack her was allegedly evil stalker ex, the fact they couldn’t get past TOR et al to start with may explain why the poor sod was nicked so often.
I don’t know if it’s just my interpretation, but the majority of posters here seem more dismayed that the woman in question did not do more to cover her electronic tracks – in which case the man would be SOL. I would prefer to have seen a few postings on how people could safeguard against spurious accusations of this type. Yes, I know that people will immediately dogpile to “believe all woman” claiming that these cases are always extremely rare. Nevertheless – the man lost his job, was criminally charged, almost certainly had to provide DNA and there doesn’t seem to be much recourse for him, except to take solace in the fact that his accuser was less tech savvy?
I don’t think it’s dismay at her lack of m@d sk1llz, more questioning how she was able to get the poor chap’s collar felt 6 times.
The modern state in the Western world is a mixture – a mixture of tyranny and incompetence.
There seems to be a new APL on the block. I would invite this individual to distinguish him or her self from the other APL with perhaps and APL-1 or APL1 ?
I made a similar faux pas when I first wandered in here, many years ago. IIRC I made one or two comments, at most, before becoming aware of a preexisting Rob and trimming my sails accordingly.
The guy lost his job over this. Any update on that?