Online Forum

I recently began receiving very abusive text messages on my mobile
My son sometimes uses my mobile phone, so I asked him if he knew anything about them.
He told me that he’d been receiving threatening emails from someone for the past few weeks. He doesn’t know how they got hold of the mobile number.
I hadn’t noticed any change in my son, but once I talked to him about what had been happening, he was really upset. The most frustrating thing is not knowing who this bully is… at least then I would be able to start addressing the problem.
I can’t change my mobile number because I need it for work. But I don’t know what else I can do…

Should I just delete the text messages so that he doesn’t see them?
Should I change our email addresses?
Perhaps I should reply to this bully and tell this bully that the police are looking into this?

We haven’t had problems with our email or text, but we did once find my daughters picture on a website, with some quite nasty remarks about her.
So we found out who owned the site ourselves, with the help of a friend who showed us how to do a “Who is?” search using this special website called; www.netnames.co.uk, which is all the contact details for everyone who owns a website on the net.
We found out that it was someone that my daughter knew at school. I contacted her parents and they had the website removed. It might be useful to do a search on the web for your sons name just in case.

Rather than going to the bother of changing your email address, why don’t you try blocking the sender in outlook express.
Highlight the offending mail in the mail list, and from the message menu, select ‘block sender’.
I know my daughter chats to her mates using instant messaging, and that has a ‘block’ feature too, which she used for a while when she had a fall out with one of her friends.
I would keep the mobile number until you get enough information about the person sending the messages.
But if it carries on maybe you need to think about a new phone number.

My son got some anonymous hate emails, but we didn’t reply, because that’s what the bully wants. My son thought he knew who was sending the mails, but couldn’t be certain because he couldn’t recognise the email address.
We found out how to look at the email header at www.fkbko.net and it turned out that the email came from his school.
The school traced the boy and punished him and they’ve now updated their bullying and acceptable use policies to deal with the problem.

If an email or text message is particularly disturbing or breaks the law, you should consider contacting the police.
Don’t delete your email or mobile phone accounts either, but you should save the messages and keep a record of the date and time they were sent.
If I was you I would set up a new email address for you son, and continue to track the old one yourself.