🤯 WOW! Twice (that I know of) in the past two weeks, police arrested a man for allegedly stalking a woman he had never met. Not an ex. Not a coworker. A total stranger. Police in Kent, Wash., put it plainly: “He saw her on social media and decided to stalk her.” Days earlier in Batavia, Ill., officers found the other man in a woman’s yard at 2:39 a.m. with burglary tools he’d bought hours before.

The Short Version: A stranger can go from your profile photo to your street address in minutes, because people-search sites sell your home address for under a buck. Lock down your profiles, and pull your address off those sites. Steps below.

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

In Kent, Wash., on Aug. 19, police arrest a 25-year-old for allegedly stalking a woman he did not know. She did everything right: documented the harassment and got a stalking protection order. He violated it anyway. Police said most stalking cases follow a bad breakup, “but this was not that.” He picked her out online.

Five days earlier in Batavia, Ill., 2,000 miles away, a woman spots a flashlight and a shadow outside her window at 2:39 a.m. Police catch a 27-year-old registered sex offender nearby, dressed in black, brush stuck to his shoes, with burglary tools bought hours earlier. How did he pick her? Police say he saw her on social media, then “researched them and found their address.”

Here’s what nobody covering that story connected. 

The Illinois suspect’s Navy court-martial record shows a 2024 conviction for sexual assault and burglary. He took a sleeping woman’s key card from her wallet, unlocked her bedroom door and sat on the floor watching her for hours. She woke up with him on top of her. He served 39 months. 

Now he’s charged with attempted residential burglary at the home of a stranger he allegedly found online.

A creep doesn’t need to be a hacker to track someone down. People-search sites bundle your name, home address, phone number, age and relatives, then sell the file for as little as $0.95. To anyone. No questions asked.

The feds know exactly where this leads. The CFPB proposed a rule to stop data brokers from selling your info to “scammers, stalkers and spies,” citing a murder committed by an attacker who bought the victim’s home address. Washington pulled the rule last year. Nobody is coming to take you off these sites.

Incogni does the removal process for you: requests to 420+ data brokers and people-search sites, then repeat requests so your profile doesn’t creep back. Go Unlimited if you’ve ever had a scary encounter. The Exposure Scanner finds profiles you didn’t know existed and lets you hit Remove. Deloitte independently verified their results. 30-day money-back guarantee.

One layer, not a force field. Incogni can’t touch social media, court files or county records, and it’s no substitute for police, documentation or a protection order (the Kent woman’s order is why the suspect’s in jail). But the page that turns your face into your street address? That comes down.

They can’t harm you if they can’t find you.* 

✅ Get 60% off right now on Incogni, and you’ll be amazed at how fast they work. BTW, I get no kickbacks or residuals if you sign up.

The woman in Kent did everything right after the stalking started. Do this part before it ever does.

🎯 Send this to someone who posts on social media. This is a real threat. Use the links below.

Your router might be tracking when you move, using nothing but Wi-Fi signals. No camera needed. We got what Xfinity has to say about it and how to turn it off.

Watch now before everyone else is talking about it. 👇

▶️ Comcast routers know your every movement →

💸 Tick tock, pay up: Your kid’s TikTok habit came with a bill, and it isn’t yours. TikTok agreed to a $400 million settlement resolving federal claims it collected personal data and tracked kids’ habits without parental consent. That’s the largest settlement under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Moola goes to the government, not you. Official info is on the Justice Department’s settlement page. Turns out the clock was ticking on them the whole time.

Class of the clones: Harvard professors have digital doubles that never sleep. Tenure apparently transfers to the cloud. Harvard Business School cloned its faculty into AI avatars for Foundry, a $699 eight-week boot camp where 760 founders have practiced investor pitches, sales calls and board meetings against a Harvard lecturer who never checks the clock. The real profs cost $75,000 a year and still cancel office hours.

📲 That app from 2021 is probably still charging you. So is the free trial that quietly became $12 a month. You need to hunt down every subscription you forgot about, line them up in one dashboard and cancel the ones you don’t want. Who has the time? I used this app and saved $465 a year. Try it now yourself.* 

🕯️ Leave Robin alone: I can’t tell if this is more shameful or creepy. Robin Williams has been dead for more than a decade, and strangers are still making him perform. His kids reactivated his Instagram on what would have been his 75th birthday, so fans finally have one verified place to find the real him instead of AI fakes of their dad saying things he never said. Grief turned into somebody else’s content calendar. 

🌘 Moonlighting tomorrow night: On the evening of Aug. 27, a partial lunar eclipse slides 96.2% of the moon into Earth’s shadow, turning it rusty red with one bright sliver left over, and North America gets front-row seats. The partial phase starts at 10:33 p.m. Eastern and peaks after midnight. No glasses, no gear, no tickets. Walk outside and look up. It’s the deepest eclipse we’ll see until the end of 2028, so drag the kids and grandkids out, too. Best show of the week, and the streaming quality is 20/20 vision.

Buried school newsletter deadlines got you stressed? There’s an AI trick that pulls out every date and permission slip in seconds. Plus, a teacher wants to use AI in her second grade classroom without replacing her students’ creativity.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Headed somewhere, but you’re not sure what the place looks like? Google Maps can show you the entrance before you leave home. Search for it, then tap the little Street View photo with the arrow. Spin around to look for the exact door, driveway or nearby landmark first. No circling the block wondering, “Wait, is that it?”

Your phone can catch the sounds you miss: Maybe you’ve got headphones on or the TV blasting. On iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Sound & Name Recognition > Sound Recognition, then choose things like doorbells, barking dogs or running water. Your phone will alert you when one happens. Android, try Settings > Accessibility > Hearing Enhancements > Sound Notifications.

🏃🏼‍♀️ Going for a run alone? Let your loved ones keep an eye on you. In Strava, tap Record, pull the bottom menu up, then tap Share Live Location. Switch on Beacon and choose up to three safety contacts. They’ll get a link showing where you are, and they don’t need Strava to open it. Better than “I should be back around 6-ish.”

Roku captions only when you need them: Start playing something, press Home on your Roku remote, then go to Settings > Accessibility/Captions > Captions mode > On replay. Captions stay hidden normally, but appear when you press Replay. Handy when you miss one line but don’t want subtitles on for the whole movie.

🔤 Claude has more than one font: Open Settings > General > Preferences > Chat font and pick something different. Dyslexic friendly is worth trying if long conversations are a little tough to read. While you’re there, you can switch the overall appearance between Light, Dark and System.

Be on the show! Tech is changing everything. You’re living it. Send me your story. I’ll read it.

Good news for anyone whose veins turn into witness protection informants when they enter a doctor’s office.

The FDA authorized Aletta, Vitestro’s robotic blood-drawing machine. It uses near-infrared and Doppler ultrasound to hunt down a suitable vein, then does basically everything: tourniquet, disinfectant, needle, collection tubes, disposal and bandage. 

So far? 94.5% first-stick success rate when the bot identified a suitable vein. Call me crazy, but the needle-stabbing robot is scarier than the human version. 

Take a look here.

Share this now:

🎓 What you learned today: Strangers can turn social posts into home addresses, Robin Williams’ family is fighting AI copies of his voice, a deep lunar eclipse is coming tomorrow night and robotic blood draws cleared the FDA. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to turn on your phone’s built-in features that fix bad calls, tiny text, typos, spam and more, no downloads or subscriptions required.

🎮 The answer: C) Three. Yep. GTA V started life on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013, jumped to the PS4 and Xbox One, then somehow survived long enough to get another release on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. It also made the leap to PC.

It sold nearly 230 million copies and kept GTA Online humming the entire time. GTA V hasn’t just crossed console generations. It’s become a family heirloom.

No official number on GTA VI preorders, but word on the street is it’s going to do even better than V. GTA VII’s release date? At this rate, we might be playing the next-next sequel on Mars. 

The level of detail in the new game is crazy. Check it out.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, WYZE, Vitestro

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