On being mobbed documents a real estate mobbing, also known as “property mobbing” or “mobbing,” in Seattle, Washington. The property being “mobbed” is the property some speculators want to “turn over” and acquire for redevelopment and speculation. In this case, the property is my home.
My neighborhood, overlooking Lake Washington, is being razed and rebuilt house by house. For almost two years, I have been continually harassed in my home by “mobbers” who work from flanking houses owned by real estate speculators or house flippers. There are four captains of the neighborhood watch living in houses within 100 yards, all of them on friendly terms with the mobbers.
Mobbing is clearly an organized crime and probably constitutes racketeering under federal law. But the harassment that is intended to evict me, the tenant, while it includes multiple felonies like stalking, cyber-stalking, and monitoring, is effected using means that are difficult for a victim to report as well as difficult for police to understand.
Network security methodologies used to detect intrusions are based on changes that can be detected in files or in computer processes; for example, the addition of a malware file, or the suspicious use of a process. These methods focus on data or material “indicators of compromise” (IOCs).
But mobbers who hack work for people with money, or at least they work for themselves or for those who want to appear to make money legally. So hacking for real estate is more likely to involve silent methods of intrusion, like packet sniffers working off of a shared Comcast line or following over wireless networks. [Note 05/09/20: Ultimately the methods of mobbers may not be focused on exfiltration—the removal of data—they may be focused on augmentation, that is, the deployment of the infrastructure necessary to effect the crime and the transmission of mobbing harassment over that infrastructure. This type of network behavior is a hack against expectation and helps to mask mobbing.]
Mobbers use these methods to get to know their victim, her habits, her vulnerabilities, and her secrets. But to “clear” victims out of the target properties, mobbers lurk. They lurk on wireless networks, they make use of radios and public PA systems. They lurk to babble, to harangue, and to harass.
Later on today or tonight I’ll post an entry on being mobbed while flying, Flying the friendly skies. Mobbers, like a lot of hackers, are interested in all things radio. So, based on my own first-hand experience, there’s no reason why a pack of property-hungry mobbers would let a “target” just fly off on some jet plane to work out of town when the going gets rough. Where there’s a radio, there’s a way.
But every action has a reaction, most have unintended consequences, and radio systems have interference. How do mobbers follow their victims onto planes? Moreover, is it safe when they do?
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