About CyberStalked!

Cyber­stalked! was cre­ated and is main­tained by Cyn­thia Armis­tead. All orig­i­nal mate­r­ial on this domain is copy­right 1996–2012 Cyn­thia Armis­tead unless oth­er­wise noted.

This site began on Cynthia’s Mind­Spring web site, then moved with the rest of her mate­r­ial to her main per­sonal site, TechnoMom.com. Cyn­thia split her site up into sep­a­rate sites in early 2006, and the inter­net safety mate­r­ial acquired its own home and a blog here at CyberStalked.org.

The site orig­i­nally began as a place to refute the defama­tion spread across the inter­net by Richard Hill­yard. Six­teen years later, it con­tin­ues to edu­cate peo­ple about to Hillyard’s char­ac­ter and crim­i­nal con­vic­tions, and it con­tin­ues to stand as a response to the lies Hill­yard is still pub­lish­ing about Cyn­thia and her fam­ily. It has grown far, far big­ger than a story about one lit­tle cow­ardly criminal’s inex­plic­a­ble obses­sion with peo­ple who’d never heard of that felon before he tar­geted them. Over time, it has become a resource for many peo­ple who find encour­age­ment in know­ing that they aren’t alone as they face harass­ment and stalk­ing, that there are things they can do, and that they do not have to give up their online pres­ence. It has given peo­ple hope.

Cyn­thia was a tech­ni­cal writer who had just begun a health-related leave of absence from Mind­Spring Enter­prises when Hillyard’s orig­i­nal attacks began in the sum­mer of 1996. As of this 2012 update, she’s dis­abled but pur­su­ing voca­tional reha­bil­i­ta­tion. She lives in Atlanta, Geor­gia near her daugh­ter Katie. She main­tains sev­eral other web sites, dab­bles in needle­work design and is learn­ing to play the ukulele.

3 Responses to “About CyberStalked!”

  1. Maria, on December 8th, 2006 at 5:07 am Said:

    Thanks for shar­ing your story. It’s pretty scary to be stalked online and peo­ple (espe­cially law enforce­ment) tend to laugh it off some­what, espe­cially when the per­son post­ing things stays under the legal def­i­n­i­tion of mak­ing threats, which is our story. My main beef is with blogger.com who has been con­tacted almost daily for about two weeks now with my request to take down the site that our stalker has put up pos­ing as my hus­band. Not to bore you, but our address, phone num­ber, along with inci­den­di­ary infor­ma­tion meant to bring ene­mies around has been posted on this site, and they won’t do any­thing other than send emails stat­ing that it’s “not their pol­icy to mod­er­ate blogs…” and rec­om­mend­ing we “con­tact the per­son and have them edit them­selves…” (I went so far as to write on one request that if they weren’t going to take it down, at least send me their address, phone num­ber, names of their kids, etc, so at least I could put them through what we’re going through…haha) Any­way, I’ll stay posted to your story to see how things unfold. I’m pretty pissed at google (they own blog­ger…) and really feel I want to pur­sue this on their end because I feel they should be account­able and have some pol­icy other than “too bad, we don’t censor…”

    Good luck.

    Maria Bray (the real one, not the one in my husband’s blog…haha)

  2. cyn, on December 8th, 2006 at 9:48 am Said:

    Does your state have any kind of law about releas­ing pri­vate infor­ma­tion? If you can get a restrain­ing order, in some states, that changes the sit­u­a­tion — maybe Blogger/Google would take things more seri­ously then?

    Good luck with it.

  3. Laurel, on December 24th, 2007 at 3:34 am Said:

    It is nice to know I’m not alone in being cyber­stalked, but unfor­nate that so many of us have had to go through this. I’m cur­rently being stalked by my sister-in-laws’s soon to be ex-husband. This all started when I posted a humor­ous blog which had noth­ing to do with him on my Myspace site. He is men­tally ill and I guess when my sister-in-law referred to him in her com­ment about it, his delu­sions of grandeur took over. Obvi­ously he was already stalk­ing my site, for some rea­son he thinks she has no mind of her own and I have influ­enced her deci­sion to leave him, even though she has done so on sev­eral occa­sions in the past.

    We have had Tro­jan viruses sent to our com­puter 3 times and I sus­pect he is behind it. Some­how our pass­word was changed on our server so that we couldn’t log on to the inter­net. There have been threat­en­ing emails on AOL sent to sev­eral of us fam­ily mem­bers, but he stops short of threat­en­ing to kill any­one, just that he is going to post and pub­lish deroga­tory things about all of us. There was sud­den spike in the views on my Myspace site after this and most recently, I sus­pect my site was hacked into. While I was on there a pic­ture of me that is only on my husband’s site popped up as my default. Then I received an email from Myspace that one of my pho­tos had to be removed because it vio­lated their terms. All of the pho­tos that I have uploaded are still there. I can’t seem to get any­thing but a pre­gen­er­ated response when I ask them what they are talk­ing about. He has also used an imposter site to try to talk to me on there and I sus­pect there is another one as well. He has even sent a pic­ture of his penis to my AOL from a cell­phone and my sister-in-law was able to iden­tify it. Kind of a dumb move, that one, if you have a dis­tin­guish­ing mole on that part of your body, you should not send a pic­ture of it to some­one to harass them.

    Have already set my site to pri­vate and changed many set­tings and pass­words. I’m sure he’ll find another way to hack into it or some other way to annoy. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if he has posted my Myspace URL on some sort of sex site because of get­ting over 500 views on a cou­ple of the days. Not nor­mal for a 40 year old woman, regard­less of what she looks like. Unless your a celebrity, I would think.

    I have reported him to Myspace and we have gone to the police in our city, and of course, they have done noth­ing. I guess if they had to scrape him off the pave­ment in front of my house they would be very inter­ested in get­ting to the bot­tom of it. I am get­ting copies of all the emails, the Myspace mes­sag­ing and ways that I’ve been able to track him together for a restrain­ing order which I doubt will do any good, since he moves around constantly.

    Maybe they’ll be scrap­ing him up soon, hope­fully some­one else will be respon­si­ble for it. He has phys­i­cally stalked my sister-in-law when she left him in the past. Even slammed his car into hers and pulled a gun on a friend of hers. If you can offer me any advice, I would appre­ci­ate it.

    Lau­rel Scheidt