14-year-old cyberstalker

Usually in the online-safety area we read about cops catching 40-something men posing as teenagers to "groom" them. But this MySpace-related story is about a 14-year-old posing as a 40-year-old to scare a peer. It's a cyberbullying story. According to the Mail Tribune in southern Oregon, investigators were preparing to subpoena MySpace for user records after a girl reported a "string" of threatening "electronic messages, escalating to phone calls and notes…. They purported to come from a 40-year-old single, white man in Medford who had an account on MySpace." But then the teen who made the threats confessed. She was expelled from the school both girls attend. A detective on the case said the case possibly could have resulted in identity theft charges for creating a false identity or harassment charges, but no criminal charges were filed. The victim's parents, relieved that their daughter wasn’t targeted by a predator, agreed not to press charges." BTW, cyberstalking is now a federal crime. It was controversial, but it passed with little publicity, USATODAY reports, so now it's a "crime to anonymously 'annoy, abuse, threaten or harass' another person over the Internet."