West Haven teen targeted by anonymous hacker, police say


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WEST HAVEN — A Skype conversation between teenagers took a frightening turn when an anonymous person in the chat began to threaten several others with personal information.

On March 23, the group of boys — who met through gaming — was chatting online and invited several other people into the conversation, according to Lt. Lane Findlay with the Weber County Sheriff’s Department. The group grew to about 16 kids, and that’s when one of them — whom police said used a voice changer to hide his identity — started making very specific threats toward several of the boys.

“During this conversation that they were having, one of these individuals started making some threats to these kids that he knew where they lived, that he could basically access their Internet and could take and sell their Social Security numbers and personal information,” said Findlay.

The anonymous male then targeted a 14-year-old West Haven boy, telling him he could hack his Internet. He listed the victim's home address and threatened to kill his dog, police said. Shortly after, the victim's Internet began to have unexplained issues.

“At one point during this conversation there was an alert that they were having Internet problems and that there were others who were now accessing their home Internet,” Findlay said.

The boy immediately told his father, who called police. He also called his Internet provider, and representatives could not find the source or cause of the outage.

But it didn’t stop there. A short time later, pizzas from Pizza Hut were delivered to the home, but no one in the family ordered them.

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“The person had used some old information, an old phone number and a family member’s name,” said Findlay.

Investigators spoke with a friend of the victim who was involved in the conversation, but he told them the alleged hacker remained anonymous by changing his username frequently. It’s unknown how he accessed the Skype conversation in the first place.

“Whoever this individual is obviously had to have had some skill to be able to gather this information,” said Findlay. “We’re looking at it a little bit more seriously than just a kid playing a prank.”

The case will go to a detective with Weber County who specializes in Internet crimes against children. However, crimes like this one are often very difficult to prosecute, according to Findlay.

“A lot of times people will change their user names, they’re out of state, out of the area so they’re very difficult to track down,” he said.

Cases like this one bring up the important issue of Internet safety, and just how dangerous the Internet can be. Parents need to set boundaries for their children to keep them safe online, Findlay said.

“Regulating the people that you’re friends with online, not allowing strangers into the conversations or especially to not have any kind of identifying information,” he said.

Contributing: Paul Nelson

[listen to ‘A West Haven, UT, family feels unsafe after receiving online threats from a reported gamer.’ on audioBoom](https://audioboom.com/boos/3029176-a-west-haven-ut-family-feels-unsafe-after-receiving-online-threats-from-a-reported-gamer)
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