Is this person the ultimate Internet troll?
In an unusual case out of the United Kingdom, a British woman was jailed for trolling herself on Facebook. Michelle Chapman, 24, was recently sentenced to 20 months behind bars for setting up fake Facebook profiles and using the accounts to write abusive remarks on her own personal page, the Mirror reports.
The ruse was aimed at her father and stepmother. Both were questioned by police, and the stepmother was eventually arrested. Police did not catch on until a year later when the fake accounts were traced back to Chapman.
The details of the unprecedented case were recently heard before the Truro Crown Court. The ploy started when Chapman reconnected with her estranged father, Roy Jackson, after two decades, according to media reports. When he introduced his daughter to his new wife, Louise Steen, things apparently did not go over well. Shortly after a family altercation, Jackson began receiving offensive messages from a Facebook profile under Steen’s name.
Later, abusive comments, which were described as of “very unpleasant sexual nature,” began pouring in on Chapman’s page. The remarks were from profiles that appeared to belong to Jackson, Steen and other relatives. Chapman reportedly complained to Cornwall police eight times between February and October 2011, as the harassment continued into early 2012, the Cornish Guardian noted.
Police took Jackson, Steen and members of her extended family in for questioning about the alleged Facebook abuse. It was only later, when forensic Internet experts investigated the source of the accounts, that it came to light that Chapman was the person behind the harassment.
The 24-year-old ultimately confessed that she had trolled herself on Facebook.
“She said that she wanted revenge on her father for matters in the past,” prosecutor Philip Lee said before the court, according to the Cornish Guardian. “She wanted to make their life hell.”
