I got in a political argument with some clown on Facebook. He managed to retrieve my wife’s cell phone number and our home phone which is unlisted and technically just provided by our Internet company that we never use.
None our personal info is really available on Facebook and our profiles are pretty locked down, but he called my wife’s phone a few times last week which she has blocked and never answers. Comes up as anonymous on her id.
He tried our home phone 16 times which I ignored, everything stopped, he called again tonight. I decided to answer. He said he knows where I live my wife and daughters name, and our address. He never gave out that though and that he is coming to kill us. Said that on the line
I have called my local police department. But this is rural Nebraska they said they can’t do anything or have our phone companies run a trace.
Is there anything I can do to figure out who this guy is?
Unfortunately there’s no real way to identify him from the profile, but this guy’s almost certainly just a harmless troll.
His profile has zero identifying info and is clearly intended to be a harassment account. (literally the only post he’s ever made is a sign saying “Support Your Local ICE Raids”) A clear hallmark of a troll is just an account made for a clear and obvious purpose: aggravating you.
The name “Frank Rizzo” is the same as this Frank Rizzo who did things like urging supporters to “vote white”, decreasing black people hired as part of the police force, raiding the Black Panther Party, general police brutality and racism, etc. A common thing trolls will do is take the name of a historical figure that somewhat aligns with the ideologies they’re trolling about, and using that name or a variation of it.
If he actually intended to kill your family, he wouldn’t have given you advance warning so you could prepare, and if he was local and was just stupid enough to do so, he probably would have shown up already.
Trolls incredibly frequently will just say anything they can to make you either angry or afraid, death threats included.
I’m not necessarily saying there’s no threat here, but it seems to me like just a guy making a deliberately inflammatory account, using data brokers to get freely available information because you annoyed him a bit, then saying what he can to make you angry and afraid because that’s why he made the account in the first place.
Edit: to clarify, I’m not trying to make light of the situation at all, I just think personally this seems like a lot of troll accounts I’ve seen before.