Articles
China Elevator Stories
Being stalked by my ex
After an occurrence in 2020, I realize I had been stalked by my ex.
07/07/2023
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
In January 2020, I meet up with a former student, whom I taught in Siping. I show him around Vienna, and we have dinner together. He tells me about his life as a student in Bonn. During our dinner at an Asian restaurant, he asks me to show him what a typical salary would be in Austria. I look it up online and hand him my phone for only a second so he can see it.
A few days after our meeting, my phone’s VPN is hacked, and my password is changed, so I can’t access my VPN anymore. My location is thus trackable.
I assume my former student was sent by my husband to spy on me. My mother-in-law knew this student in person, and my husband and I had been separated at that time, but not yet divorced.
Months go by, and by the summer of the same year, emails spookily vanish from my inbox before I can open them and read them. A few times after this occurrence and during Austria’s lockdowns, a blonde-haired stranger follows me around Vienna when I leave the house to visit a friend or to do grocery shopping.
The day my VPN got hacked into, I knew my husband had had Stalkerware installed on my phone. I only found out later that certain spyware allows a stalker to delete a person’s emails from their inbox before the person would be able to read them.
Stalking is notoriously hard to prove, so there was nothing much I could do.
Have you ever been stalked?