"Don't talk to strangers!" also applies to Microsoft's service

Dec 31, 2007 13:04 GMT  ·  By

It has come to this? While we're enjoying "the season to be jolly", other people seem more keen on tormenting innocent gamers, by harassing them. Enter Xbox Live? Microsoft's famous service allowed a 15 year old girl and a 20 year old man to meet virtually, play a bit of Halo and start chatting, but things got serious all of sudden. As reported by GameRush, the man started harassing the gamer girl, after finding out details about her (address plus phone number) with the aid of the omniscient Google.

The logical thing to do (for a stalker) was to start sending her flowers and various other gifts, of course rejected by the girl's parents. Add numerous phone calls to that behaviour and you'll have the perfect prototype of a stalker. The 15 year old had to change her phone number and things got even more serious last week when the stalker tried to pay the teenager a visit.

Seems that the fellow drove all the way from New York to Spokane, passing by the girl's house while sending inappropriate text messages. This was predictably enough followed by a police complaint of her parents and an arrest of the stalker, while he was resting at a local hotel. Such stories really make you think twice before starting to chat with the people you've just met on Xbox Live. They may be much older than they seem and much more dangerous for that matter. Who knows, you might even end up playing Call of Duty 4 with a terrorist, while admiring his surprisingly good skills at the game of war.

I suppose that we're going to see some sort of feature surfacing on the Xbox Live, making the whole chatting process stricter, like a "report offensive language and harassment" option, in case there isn't one already.