A Connecticut woman says her ex-boyfriend weaponized the same smart-home technology he gave her as a gift, using it to track her movements, manipulate her house, and sabotage her career. She has filed a police report, and Connecticut authorities say the investigation is ongoing. No arrest has been made.
The woman, identified only by her initials, AM, works in fashion, luxury retail and beauty. She said her ex set up a smart home system for her while she was away on a trip to Europe.
“He told me that I now have a smart house. I loved the idea of controlling lights and my stereo speakers remotely, through my phone,” she said.
After the two broke up, AM says the convenience became a nightmare. Lights dimmed at random times. The television switched off while her daughter was watching. A GPS tracker, the kind typically used to locate luggage, turned up in her car.
“After the fact I realized that I was 100-percent targeted,” she said.
AM says the intrusion went well beyond her house. She says her ex accessed her cloud storage and knew her travel plans, her emails, and more. She claims he had people following her overseas and altered the names in her phone contacts — putting a high-level creative director’s number under the name of her babysitter.
“So, I think I am calling the babysitter, but I am actually calling a creative director. He was trying to make me look crazy. My Rolodex is my currency, and my network is my net worth. He was trying to destroy all of that,” she said.
AM says her ex told her directly that he had the power to control her.
“He knew he could paralyze me and take me down. He used to say, ‘Don’t f–k with me.’ I was scared. But I had no idea he could control me from afar,” she said.
She has since gone through four iPhones trying to shake the surveillance. Steven S. Stern, principal of Safe Harbor Advisory, was hired to help her and confirmed to the New York Post that he found spyware on her devices.
“The use of technology has become so sophisticated and almost impossible to defend against for a normal person. They gain access to your phone, your computer, and they’re in your house,” Stern said.
Not an isolated case
Technology-enabled stalking is spreading across the country. Aine O’Neill, a TV host from Ireland who had moved to California, says she was targeted by tracking tags planted on her car. She eventually scrapped the vehicle and left Los Angeles altogether, returning to Ireland to escape the harassment. Her alleged stalker has not been publicly identified.
In June, New York resident Anthony Belford was arraigned on federal cyberstalking charges after allegedly posting AI-generated nude images of a woman as part of what prosecutors describe as a lengthy campaign using spoofed social media and email accounts. He has not yet entered a plea.
In Pennsylvania, social media figure Brett Michael Dadig, who called himself “God’s assassin,” pleaded guilty to stalking 11 women. Court reporting from Trib Live notes the stalking itself was not carried out through AI, though Dadig claimed ChatGPT, which he used as a therapist, told him his actions were part of a divine plan.
Security experts warn that AI chatbot accounts represent a new frontier of vulnerability. Rachel Talley, a principal at Safe Harbor Advisory, said hacked AI accounts can expose a person’s most private thoughts.
“If they can get into your AI, they can see all the personal things you are putting in there. They can come at you psychologically as opposed to just physically or technologically,” Talley said.
Talley says she has lived through this herself. A stalker broke into her home while she slept and used her thumbprint to unlock her phone and access her accounts.
“He would send messages to people I knew and then block them when they responded. It was traumatizing. Complete and utter chaos,” she said.
The pattern across these cases is the same: tools built for convenience — smart homes, GPS trackers, AI chatbots, cloud accounts — handed over to an abuser become tools of control. Americans who rely on this technology daily have little practical defense against someone who already has access to their devices.
