A few months back in Albany, in early morning harassment likely performed by one of the houses to my south, a male voice said: “When they came to me and said they wanted to mob you, I told them it would be a mistake.” The words were spoken under his breath. The next words were louder: “Now get out!”
From the start, the mobbers made clear what they wanted. With harassing statements injected into my house over radio, speaker, and wireless services, and with stage whispers and conversations from the driveway or veranda to ensure I overheard, their argument was a litany: “Move on!”, “Get out!”, “She’s surrounded,” “There’s nothing she can do,” “Someone wants to build on it,” “This is a professional real estate hit,” “We’ll turn on the potty-cam if you don’t get out,” “We know where you lay your head in the bed,” “We’re mobbers,” and more. But no matter the threats to embarrass (“We’ve got pictures of you picking your nose!”), or the threats to harm (“We’ll kill you online, and off!” or “There’s a bomb in your car!”) what horrified me was the fact that it was not simply the sociopathic neighborhood watch co-captain across the street, but those who’d built or bought houses on multiple sides of my own in the past few years, their parents, and even their children who were participating. And some of them held professional licenses.
The fact of their collusion in this predatory and transgressive crime that Amnesty International has deemed a human rights crime was clear from the driveway conversations, the vehicles coming and going, and the “shift changes” that have day-in and day-out determined the tenor and intensity of the mobbing harassment. In my case, the failure for the clandestine in-home harassment to convince me—the victim—that my home was haunted, that I was losing my mind, or that I was being cyberstalked by nefarious criminals thousands of miles away was, however, assured by the fact that for the nasty neighborhood watch captain and her nasty friends, mobbing me was an escalation of preexisting harassment. The mobbers had dropped their hand.
I don’t know why the Albany mobber—who for all I know could have been a mobber from somewhere else patched in to some exterior speaker-enabled access point, a Ring camera, or an Xfinity hot spot—might have told those who wanted to mob me that it would be a mistake. I don’t know whether it might have been because they had already started to mob the Albany house with my mother in it, or because the mobber recognized that the circumstances weren’t right to make me believe, that I was not given to superstition, that I had some understanding of technology, was unlikely to be duped, or whether he played to my vanity as he took his turn that morning, mobbing me as I lay in my bed.
Early on in my posts in this blog, I talked about mobbing as a systematic approach to clandestine forced eviction. In my case, as the co-conspirators emerged with their toolkits, it became apparent that mobbing is a system—an orchestrated and managed system with strong components of living-off-the-land and denial-of-service exploits. The fact that mobbing is a system, and with IoT an autonomous system demonstrating heavy reliance on motion detection, made it easier to understand and describe as a crime.
Describing this scam as a haunted house built around the victim works on multiple levels. But early on in the mobbing, as I tried to research the situation I found myself in, I came across the term “murmuring house.” The context was vigilante action to run pederasts and the like out of town.
I could not verify the term, but the concept of a murmuring house that metes out inescapable punishment has informed other pieces I’ve written—for example, where I’ve mentioned the mobbers’ telling me that mobbing was “a professional real estate hit” or that I had “stayed too long.” So too has the sleazy innuendo of the mobbing defamation that is used to compel the victim to abandon rights and flee, not to mention the thoroughly corrupt drive to criminalize the tenure of the victim in the neighborhood. These themes are evident in the nature of mobbing as a crime whose starting point is monitoring. “Watch her!” bellowed the conniving out-of-state developer as he departed the building site across from my rental home in Seattle.
It’s important to clarify that this mobbing I describe as involving wireless services and the heavy use of access points and hotspots, likely predates WiFi, and even the cellular phone. With the sick penchant of some neighborhood watch coordinators and block coordinators to elevate themselves by degrading others, the murmuring house likely existed before digitization. Radios existed before digitization. Dirty tricks like taking advantage of neighbors’ below-grade foundations, abandoned pipes, “deferred maintenance,” and the proximity of their utilities were in play before digitization. Digitization has exponentially increased the volume of radios, changed “classic” crimes and spawned new ones. For real estate speculation, it appears to have extended an accessible platform for the clandestine forced turnover of single-family homes.
The murmuring house may have originated as a form of vigilantism, but it’s tailor-made to a market in which properties are scarce, where buyers avoid houses with a ghostly presence, and where houses said to be “haunted” can be had for below-market prices. Novel tech crimes, too, are a great fit when scammers seek to avoid liability and prey on the vulnerable or older populations with assets accumulated over a lifetime.
Like other crimes, mobbing has taken on “digital aspects,” and any Tom, Dick or Harry can run out and get a mobile router, install a speaker-enabled access point, or buy a Sonos sound system. If, as a Seattle mobber implied, a “bounty” can be claimed for “clearing” a property, there’s incentive. And if the scam runs through lumber suppliers like Ashby Lumber where at least one of the Albany mobbers works, there are ready locations for deal making and trafficking in the turnover of other people’s houses.
With wireless services, mesh networks and range extenders, mobbing is easier than ever. And when the involvement of the neighborhood watch puts the police on the mobbers’ side, they can select their victims based on factors like politics, gender, and the type of residential agreement in play. Their aims need not be limited to property. When criminals are permitted to mob in towns like Albany, California and Seattle, Washington, mobbing is a platform for whackos, right-wingers, Trumpers, anti-choice “activists,” authoritarians, those whose enjoyment comes in punishing others—come one, come all haters and abusers—to punish with impunity.
Between greed and lack of technical knowledge, however, mobbers appear to be oblivious to the fact that the MAC addresses of their devices are recorded on every frame of their wireless communications. They’re getting away with it now because the crime is novel and most of us don’t know that we can visualize the rogue devices and access points they deploy and should begin to challenge them. But a greater reason for their getting away with it is because we tolerate the pervasive systemic corruption and gender bias that allows women to be battered out of their homes using the apparatus of government and in complete disregard for their human and civil rights. Given the choice between the truthful story of a female victim and the lies of one or more of a white male builder, a house flipper or investor, or a sociopathic watch captain or block coordinator, I lose every time.
That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. A woman isn’t supposed to have to give up so much for resisting a predatory crime or having the verve (as one of my instructors once called it) to document it as I continue to be forced to spend my time doing because those who mob will continue to mob their victims out of their rights, their homes, and their lives until they are arrested and prosecuted.
A contractor who recently came to the Albany house commented that when people think a house will turn over, sometimes they get mad when it does not. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that mobbers entrap their victims in murmuring houses. Because, really, if you’re occupying a property a real estate speculator wants, what else could you be but a criminal.
