The message which landed in Hannah Mossman Moore’s inbox on the afternoon of January 14, 2018, was short and to the point.
‘Online reputation management’ read the subject, in block capitals. Scrolling down, Hannah, then 25, saw what could only be construed as a chilling threat: from now on, all her online interactions, from emails and texts to social media, would be under someone else’s control.
It was deeply sinister and Hannah could only assume her account had been hacked.
The reality was even darker: that targeted message was the start of a deluge of emails, calls and messages that would take over the jewellery designer’s life for much of her 20s, penetrating not only her own online identity but entire networks of family, friends and even employers.
Wherever Hannah fled, and however many new emails and numbers she tried, the ‘hacker’ would find her, over time sending such vile, sexualised and misogynistic threats that she became frightened to leave her home.
Because Hannah wasn’t just being hacked, but stalked – the title of the compelling, unsettling new BBC podcast Hannah co-hosts with investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr.
In it, the now 32-year-old relates the unfolding horror of what happened to her and her Herculean efforts to try to identify exactly who was responsible for a wholesale takeover of her life.
Hannah is a head-turner, charismatic and fun, but behind that confident facade the legacy of what happened to her looms large
‘We think of stalking as a man stood across the street from your front door, but this has the same effect,’ Hannah says. ‘It’s what one woman calls murder in slow motion, because it’s a stealth takeover of every part of your life.
‘And what is terrifying is that, while this happened to me,
this story goes beyond me, because it can easily happen to anyone – especially vulnerable young women.’
On the surface at least, the Hannah I meet today doesn’t seem to fit into said category. A head-turner, she is charismatic and fun, but behind that confident facade the legacy of what happened to her looms large.
‘When my anxiety was at its worst, I thought that if a van came close to me on the street, someone was going to jump out and snatch me, and I still haven’t quite shaken off that sense,’ she confides.
Now living with her boyfriend in London, she admits the thought of ever living on her own again fills her with panic.
‘I imagined that for the launch of the podcast, I would be strong, powerful and sparkly and, you know – that’s not the reality. I’m not yet over this,’ she says.
The daughter of a freelance photographer and a teacher, only child Hannah grew up a sociable girl with dreams of working in fashion.
‘From very young, I was passionate about having this big career,’ she says. So, after graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, she was delighted to be offered an internship at Alighieri, then a fledgling British jewellery brand.
Her first assignment was to attract new buyers at London Fashion Week.
‘I’d walked straight into my dream job, it was all so glamorous and exciting,’ she recalls. It was at Fashion Week that, through a friend, she met Kin Hung, a Hong Kong-based businessman in his late 40s who, her friend told her, had ‘connections everywhere’.
When the pair were introduced, Kin suggested that Hannah send him Alighieri’s ‘look book’ to see if he could help open doors.
It proved to be the start of a close, if unlikely, friendship – one in which Kin was able to give Hannah access to a tantalising world of expensive restaurants, fashion shows and parties.
‘At the same time, I was very aware that there’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ she said. ‘So I turned a lot of his invitations down, while continually emphasising that I didn’t want anything more than a friendship. I did enjoy spending time with him, though. We got on.’ She pauses. ‘Now, looking back, I think he was obsessed with me.’
Kin told Hannah he worked for a big menswear brand in Asia, although he tended to deflect any more questions about his background. ‘That wasn’t unusual for a successful businessman, and he knew people. He really got looked after. So everything added up,’ she says.
Nonetheless, she admits that in hindsight she was naive. ‘I hadn’t really spent any time in the real world at that point, so I was quite innocent, very friendly and sparkly.’ She pauses. ‘Maybe a bit too nice.’
In 2016, Hannah spent a period working in Sri Lanka for a gemstone company and the pair lost touch but, when she returned home after being struck with dengue fever, she was grateful for Kin’s thoughtfulness and the pair’s friendship rekindled.
‘It took me a long time to recover and I couldn’t hang out with a lot of people my age as I didn’t have the energy. He’d invite me to fashion shows in the day, so I didn’t get too tired, or we’d go out to a healthy juice bar. He was so good at giving me professional advice, too,’ she recalls. So when, in December 2017, Kin asked if Hannah wanted to join him at the annual prestigious international art fair Art Basel in Miami, she jumped at the chance.
‘It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity and, at that age, you don’t overthink. It would be the longest time we’d spent together, but I thought if it was weird I could just go and stay with a friend.’
In the event, ‘weird’ doesn’t even cover it: almost from the moment she arrived, Hannah was greeted by a seemingly panicking Kin who said his email accounts were being aggressively hacked by ransom seekers asking him to pay a vast sum to regain control.
The hackers then apparently turned their attention to Hannah. ‘I was getting bombarded with messages from someone saying they were Kin’s girlfriend, telling me he was making stuff up about hackers to cover his lies,’ she recalls. ‘Then there was another bombardment of messaging saying things like, “Yo, lady, get your rich boyfriend to pay our ransom”. It became really scary.’
By now, holed up in a property outside Miami to which Kin
had access, Kin was acting strangely, too.
‘I told him I was scared and wanted to leave,’ she says.
‘It’s hard to explain how terrifying it is when you’re somewhere unfamiliar with somebody who starts to act totally out of character. He was drinking heavily, banging pool balls really hard on the pool table. It felt completely out of control.’
During a brief period when Kin was distracted, Hannah managed to flee and get a cab to a hotel booked and paid for by her brother, who she had quickly called in a panic.
‘I have never been so scared,’ she says. Later that day, she got on a flight back to London after sending a message to Kin asking him not to contact her again. ‘When I landed he’d messaged me saying: “Hey, I’ve just woken up and I can’t remember anything, and you’re gone. What happened?” I was very clear I didn’t want to hear from him again,’ she says. ‘I was shaken, but I thought that was the end of it.’
Far from it. Three weeks later, her email inbox pinged with that email from an unknown sender with the subject line ‘online reputation management’.
It was the first of many threatening emails from a confusing cast of characters informing Hannah that her life would be taken over.
‘It seemed glaringly obvious to me it was Kin, that he was angry, and trying to get to me,’ she says. But, confusingly, at the same time, the ‘real’ Kin was apparently sending Hannah aggressive messages asking her to return items he had given her – along with other parallel messages telling her he was still being hacked, that ‘the hackers’ had ‘jumped’ to her and to ignore any messages purporting to be from him.
‘It was bamboozling,’ says Hannah. ‘It was hard to make sense of it all. Kin seemed to have been hacked while I was with him, which added to this sense that it could be someone else, too.’
In time, the bombardment ramped up.
The emails, which started to snowball in volume, were joined by phone calls, one after the other, minute after minute, with no one at the end of the line if she answered. ‘If it was on, my phone rang incessantly and pinged with messages,’ she says. ‘I changed numbers and email addresses but to no avail.’
Overwhelming though this was, it was only the start: Hannah’s stalker had created fake Instagram profiles and added fake profiles of her to WhatsApp groups, via which they sent offensive message to friends.
Her stalker was even able to disable her bank account and had personal details of her family and friends, including their bank and passport details.
‘It was horrendous,’ she says. ‘My phone and everything that connected me to the world started to become my enemy. But even getting rid of my phone wasn’t going to change anything, aside from isolating myself, because all this horrible stuff was continuing without me.’
By late spring 2018, Hannah also discovered her stalker had been in contact with an old employer, threatening to take them to court.
‘I’d actually dropped them a line to say they should probably know I was being hacked and they were utterly traumatised, saying: “Wait – is this the first time you’ve actually been in touch since leaving the company?” Because I’d been emailing them for the past three months, threatening legal action about payment of my salary saying they were breaking government rules – except, of course, it wasn’t me.’
It was at this point that Hannah went to the police, armed with mountains of paperwork – printouts of messages, emails and social media accounts – which she believed pointed to Kin.
The signs were not initially good.
‘The police’s position was basically that there wasn’t much they could do other than issue a harassment warning. They basically told me to delete all messages and block the sender. But that doesn’t achieve anything, because they always find you, and you are deleting evidence.’
Even so, Hannah admits to feeling a degree of optimism when she left the police station, believing it might prove the beginning of the end of her nightmare.
She couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘In fact, things got worse,’ she says quietly. Her stalker continued the deluge, except now the emails were increasingly sexualised and degrading, sent not just to her but her boyfriend.
Multiple accounts were set up in fake names in which she was billed as a ‘premium escort’, advertising her services as ‘Hooker Hanny’, sent to her boyfriend, friends and family and describing violent sex acts that she ‘enjoyed’.
Equally devastating was that whoever was sending them seemed to know where she was at all times. ‘There was this horrible feeling of surveillance,’ she says. ‘You don’t know where you’re being watched.’
Stalked is the title of the compelling, unsettling new BBC podcast Hannah co-hosts with investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, right
Desperate to try to wipe the slate clean, in 2019 Hannah travelled to Sri Lanka again with her boyfriend, working on setting up her jewellery brand, Jean London, only for the online stalking to follow them there, too. ‘I was desperately trying to hold on to some sense of myself, but it felt like I would never escape,’ she says.
Blow followed blow: in March 2020, just as Hannah had made the decision to return to the UK in the face of the spiralling Covid pandemic, she received a message from the police telling her they were closing the case.
‘I just felt complete despair,’ she says. ‘There seemed no way to ever get away from it all. I tried so hard to get on with my life because I was determined not to let this person win. But it felt like everything was against me and there was no route to stopping whoever wanted to ruin me.’
The police have since acknowledged that they could have done more, and that better systems are now in place to help victims of cyber stalking like Hannah.
Hannah remained convinced that her ordeal would never end. Then, over a conversation in Autumn 2021 with journalist Cadwalladr – who had briefly been a stepmother figure after dating Hannah’s father – the pair came up with the idea of a podcast exploring what had happened.
They also wanted to see if data engineer specialists and text analysis experts could conclusively unravel the labyrinthine online trail created by her stalker.
‘We created a WhatsApp group between me, Carole, and two producers called Georgia Catt and Rob Byrne. And within a month of us talking to the BBC, the stalking stopped,’ she says. ‘So that was very strange and hard not to believe that they were linked.’
It took a long time for Hannah to accept her four-year long ordeal had ended – and to an extent she still hasn’t.
‘When you have been living on adrenaline like that it is hard to shed,’ she says. ‘I was never anxious, but now I have to take medication and I struggle with being alone. I’m not sure that will ever go away. There’s a little bit of me always waiting for the bomb to drop.’
The question underpinning our interview, of course, is whether she still believes that Kin was the man responsible for ruining her life for four long years.
While the researchers’ work is ongoing – the podcast is a work in progress, with new episodes released week to week – there is much left to learn. They don’t know whether Kin is behind it all, but do believe he is involved.
‘I think everything points to it being him,’ Hannah says.
Kin has repeatedly and robustly denied targeting Hannah – his London lawyers say he denies all accusations and adamantly denies ever stalking or harassing Hannah, rejecting the allegations as ‘false and without foundation’.
Whatever the truth, it is, she admits, horrible to think that she lost so many years of her life courtesy of one apparently innocuous meeting amid the seductive glamour of London Fashion Week.
Yet she emphasises that the purpose of the series is less a ‘whodunnit’, or even a ‘whydunnit’, than a warning.
‘If I could turn back the clock, there are so many things I would not have done,’ she says. ‘I would not have befriended Kin, or flown to Miami. But the point is not that this happened to me because of those things, but that these things can happen to anyone.’
- Stalked is available now on BBC Sounds
