It’s unlikely that a victim who is constantly verbally abused in a mobbing of significant duration will be able to recount every criminal utterance. I’m sure I cannot. When you’re being victimized over a protracted period of time, the slings and arrows of mobbing blend together and you’re unlikely to remember each and every moment you were threatened, insulted, and demanded to “Move on!” or to “Get out!” The greatest concern of a mobbing victim is likely to be surviving the crime rather than documenting it. And when the crime is enabled by technology and by the proximity of neighboring homes, survival is no easy feat.

Mobbing, as I’ve remarked numerous times on On being mobbed, is a hoax, inside a con, inside a scam. In its totality, mobbing of the kind that afflicts my own neighborhood is a real estate scam, one that benefits home owners who want to maximize profits when they flip their homes by inflating property values in advance. To protect the participants from exposure, at least as practiced in Seattle, real estate mobbing is an undetectable, or “white glove,” crime that is intended to quickly overwhelm the victim and leave no witnesses behind. This is probably why the mobbers of northeast Seattle—or at least the likely private detectives who help corrupt neighborhood watch groups and their real estate investor friends to turn over single-family homes—front-loaded my own mobbing with hoax after hoax.

“We’re hoaxsters!”, chortled one of the mobbers as they shifted tactics months into the mobbing and began to try to wheedle and cajole me into acquiescing to a crime they were sure could not be found out. “We’re hoaxsters!”, the mobber cried merrily, using the term as though harassing someone out of her home was a harmless prank.

These were the months when the mobbers had me going, but couldn’t quite get me to go. This is when I put duct tape over the IR sensor on the face of the stereo receiver after the owner of the north mobbing house declared that he was “standing here with a universal remote” in his hand. This is when I lowered light fixtures in the house looking for those “GPS buttons” that the mobbers told me were allowing them to track me in my own home. This is when I considered throwing out my bicycle panniers after they said they’d put “GPS spray” on them. This was when I changed work laptops three times within the space of weeks, ultimately losing a contract when the mobbers pulled the hoax on me that they’d put a bot on my machine and I reported it to Microsoft Security. Later I read online that some had lost their homes over a similar hoax. This is when the neighbors in the mobbing houses north and south popped up on my bedside Proton radio with my morning NPR and I responded by upturning my mattress looking for eavesdropping devices as they gleefully told me I was getting “colder,” “warmer,” and then “hot” again. This is when I shut down online access to my bank account and froze my credit with the Big Three. This is when I warned my mother to call police if she received any threatening phone calls, and so much more. As the threats escalated to include bodily harm, the mobbers said there was a “bomb” in my car—no doubt the kind of hoax that would make someone who phoned it in to the police look mentally unstable. This type of hoax could also be seen as a variation on “swatting,” one in which the victim reports himself. Another time, the voice of a departing mobber on the other side of the hedge that separated my front yard from the north mobbing house boasted, “We’ll kill you online, and we’ll kill you offline too.” This voice was associated with a somewhat androgynous kid who looked like what we used to call a “baby dyke” or a “nerd” without the pocket protector. This person, who appeared to spend weekends at the north mobbing house, came in a silver Toyota Rava. I later learned that “killing” someone online meant humiliating them by releasing personal information into the public sphere. (Image, “The Court Jester,” By P. B. Abery – “The Court Jester”, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41793811.)

The word “hoax” has dual meanings. Unlike the word “scam,” which real estate mobbing ultimately is; or the word “con,” which is short for the “confidence game” of a “con artist,” Google’s dictionary defines “hoax” as “a humorous or malicious deception.” Dictionary.com defines the word less ambiguously, offering a colorful array of synonyms: fool, dupe, fleece, rook, deceive, frame, gull, hoodwink, con, flimflam, sting, bluff, swindle, bamboozle, delude, chicane, murphy, gammon (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hoax). “Hoodwink,” a 16th century compounding of “hood”  and “wink”—meaning to cover the eyes or to blindfold—is another word the mobbers repeatedly threw into the mix, jovially declaring, “We hoodwinked you.”

Some of the mobbers’ statements were staged to instruct. They told me what they wanted me to believe and what they wanted me to do. For example, they informed me that if I reported them to the police, they would say I was harassing them. Another time, one of them said to another, as a group of them mobbed me, “Daria says she has to leave of her own free will.” “Daria” I had been told, was an attorney. According to Wikipedia, impersonation is a common feature of digital crime and it is a tactic that the mobbers, who ply their trade remotely or from unseen positions, make good use of. For example, in the earliest months of the mobbing declaring they were “attorneys” or “traffic cops” as they attempted to use symbols of authority to intimidate me out of my home.

The statements about “hoax[ing]” and “hoodwink[ing],” however, likely have another purpose. On one hand, such statements could be intended to convince the victim of a mobbing that being continuously harassed by neighbors inside her own home is innocent—nothing more than a bit of tomfoolery. On the other hand, telling a mobbing victim that you’ve fooled him—duped, deceived, tricked, or suckered him—is likely intended to embarrass him in a manner he may not want to disclose to others.

Numerous of the hoaxes of the early mobbing were almost certainly attempts to embarrass. For example, hoaxing a mobbing victim into believing there are cameras in her bathroom and then taking it a step further by telling her there’s a potty-cam of her on the Internet. The mobbers did that for some weeks, telling me that I’d never find the potty-cam online. That could have been intended to make me google in a wild panic for a potty-cam with my name on it or to make me navigate parts of the Internet that could embarrass a person and damage his reputation. Then the mobbers began to use a potty-cam as a threat, telling me they’d taken it down, but that they would put it back up if I didn’t “get out.”

Over time, these hoaxes I did not succumb to gave way to other hoaxes, insults and threats. As the mobbers eventually wearied of their elaborate but ultimately unsuccessful stagings, the content of the harassment was reduced to a more conservative set of repeating insults; to babble that is disruptive but would probably be nonsensical to potential witnesses or if I were able to successfully record them; and to their incessant demands that I “Leave!” “Move on!” or “Get out!” Before the harassment crossed the threshold of my home via technology high and low, the mobbing had kicked off with the nasty neighborhood watch lady across the street gossiping with her gaggle in front of my house about how I was “the Village Idiot.” This insult remained a repeating motif in the mobbing and is likely a fundamental ploy in this type of bullying in which humiliation appears to be a goal.

I cannot be sure the threats were empty. I have no idea whether one of those instrumental in the crime of attempting to harass me out of my home will become panicked by my unwillingness to “Shut up!” and physically harm me. But along the way, I concluded that in this “white glove” crime, many of these threats or hoaxes amounted to lies that were intended to manipulate me into leaving my home. Most importantly, these were carefully constructed lies that were intended to exploit traits like modesty and shame. These lies were intended to embarrass.

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This isn’t to say that there are no hoaxes any longer. On a fundamental level, the basic premise of mobbing is a hoax. Mobbing may be founded on the mobbers’ belief they can convince their victims that they can see and hear everything the victims do in their homes. But that’s probably not true.

When someone speaks to us, we assume they can see us. And when someone has malicious intentions, they can use whatever information they have about us to make us feel as though we are being watched, even to make us feel self-conscious and uncomfortable to the point where we change our behavior. It’s not hard to come by the kind of details that you’d need to throw into, say, some blind cell phone bullying, to make a frightened victim believe you know him well.

This kind of information can be had by observing someone from afar, using social networking sites or stealing personal information. Someone with hacking skills may be able to mine your email information—my mobbers told me at the outset that they had all the email I’d ever written—or they can eavesdrop or camfect using your computer. Or maybe all they need is to see your picture on your Facebook page and to then combine common sense with some imagination. A competent mobber probably doesn’t need any information at all. All they need to do is to prey on human vulnerabilities. They can tell teenagers they’re ugly and that no one will ever love them. They can tell middle-aged men they’re losing their hair and verility. They can tell middle-aged women that they’re old. No matter what they say to try to make you believe they know something about you, when you’re being bullied in the privacy of your own home, it’s easy to conclude that the bullies have eyes on you right now.

In the end, someone who believes that their neighbors are watching them in their own home will probably consider moving. Because that’s creepy. When mobbing is used to turn over a property, it could pivot on this alone.

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Crimes that shame or embarrass their victims are often crimes that are not reported. The victims of fraud, sexual harassment, and rape may not report the crimes because they are ashamed. In Feminist Criminology, Karen G. Weiss publishes research that “delineates the cultural ideologies regarding gender and sexuality that contribute to victims’ definitions of their situations as shameful, and ultimately, to their reluctance to report incidents to the police.” (Abstract, “Too Ashamed to Report: Deconstructing the Shame of Sexual Victimization,” first published July 19, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085110376343). According to Sarah O’Grady of The Express, up to 72 percent of Britons victimized by fraud do not report the crime to police because they are “mortified” (“Fraud victims ‘too embarrassed to report they have fallen for a scam’,” The Express, October 26, 2017, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/871049/victims-fraud-scam-too-embarrassed-report). According to O’Grady, fraud victims said they would prefer to “walk around with their skirt tucked in their underwear” or to be subject to other similar indignities rather than to “tell someone about their terrible experiences.”

Given a choice between accepting forced eviction and disclosing the fact that someone has “made a fool” of them, mobbing victims might well capitulate and leave their homes. If people are too ashamed to report rape, why should they report that they are being harassed out of their homes like criminals?

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There are numerous reasons for a real estate mobbing to enter the courtroom. The fact that a mobbing enters the courtroom at all is likely to point to a victim who has resisted expulsion. In such a case, the mobbers may move to protect the scam and those who participate in it by telling the police that the victim is in fact harassing them. When push comes to shove, real estate mobbing enlists the hierarchical structures of city government and the courts to eject the mobbing victim from his home, in much the same manner in which, in workforce mobbing, a murder of crows instigated by coworkers works its way into the office hierarchy and culminates in the victim being fired. But in an added twist, in real estate mobbing these instruments of governance—whether the police, the court system, or the attorneys and psychologists who attend the courts—also fall victim to the mobbers’ scam as they doubt the words of the victim, as they fail to understand tech-enabled crimes, as they are willing to believe any and all of the wild accusations the mobbers make about the victim, and as they fail to distinguish the reports of the victims of tech-enabled harassment from paranoid delusion.

The choices faced by those who resist forced eviction by mobbing are bleak. Mobbing victims may be treated with derision and as though they are mentally ill. When mobbing enters the courtroom, a mobbing victim may already have been defamed as not only mentally ill, but of a criminal disposition. Even if the victim of tech-enabled harassment reports what is happening to a psychologist who should have insight into bullying, the apparent widespread inability of mental health professionals to differentiate between stalking and delusion, or between delusion and “smart” home abuse or tech-enabled harassment, may ultimately lead to compulsory confinement for a lengthy psychological evaluation, or even to a legal finding that the victim is incompetent and therefore not credible.

But what happens if the courts begin to realize that the mobbing victim is not mentally ill, but is in fact telling the truth? The victim pays a price, not only when she reports and is not believed, but even if she is believed. The prosecution of a crime requires the victim to provide detailed information about how she was victimized, and the things that were said and done to her. A mobbing, in and of itself, is constructed to embarrass the victim. To divulge the content of a mobbing is to reveal one’s own humiliation.

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Not all of the hoaxes in a mobbing are constructed for their effect on the victim. Some of them, like the legally obstructive deception that it is the mobbing victim who is harassing the mobbers, or that the mobbing victim is mentally ill, hoax the psychologists who diagnose the victims of mobbing crimes as delusional, the attorneys who charge them, challenge their competency, and prosecute them, and even the courts in which the mobbing victims may be prosecuted. In the end, the police, the attorneys, the court and the prosecutor, even the court-appointed psychologist—the hoax is on them.

I wasn’t wearing a tin-foil hat when the real estate mobbers of northeast Seattle started in on me. The mobbers would have to give me one.

(Stay tuned for part 2, to be published this weekend.)