By Mattea Columpsi, Jennifer Francis, Rose Mansbridge-Goldie, Karlie McGeough and Allan Ly

Married for 42 years, Jacki Harris of Regina described her husband Bob as “the most awesomest guy in the whole planet.”

When he passed in the fall of 2019, she crafted a loving obituary that was published on the Regina Leader-Post and Speers’s Funeral Home websites — not knowing this would result in a nightmare of identity theft by cyber criminals that the law seemed powerless to prevent.

After Bob’s death and during his identity theft, Harris said she couldn’t cope.

Bob Harris passed away in October 2019. He is greatly missed by family, friends and acquaintances. Video supplied by Jacki Harris.

“I’m rattled to my soul,” said Harris. “My husbands just passed away and all of these things are starting to happen and I feel like I’m having to run ahead to keep up with this stuff.”

In a national investigation led by the Institute for Investigative Journalism, investigative journalism students interviewed 498 people about their online experiences. Of those, 188 said they or a close family member had their privacy breached online.

Harris put her husband’s obituary in the newspaper on October 15, 2019 and the theft of her late husband’s identity started that day.

The day after his obituary was posted, she received a debit card from BMO under her husband’s name, although neither she nor her late husband had ever banked there.

When she turned to the police for answers, what she learned was terrifying.

The police told Harris the cyber thieves would likely come to her house and try to intercept the letters with the pin numbers and physical credit cards addressed to Bob.

Harris turned to the Regina Police Service with the information she gathered and asked for help.

She said dealing with this while trying to grieve the death of her husband was “horrendous”

“I have never dealt with anxiety until that,” said Harris.

“[That] took me to my knees for this country because is that where we are now?” said Harris. “I lived in this perfect little world that thought, you know this’ll never happen, people aren’t that bad.”

The five major banks have a strict process when it comes to privacy breaches. TD, RBC, CIBIC, ScotiaBank and BMO promise reimbursement if something happens to your account but it has to fall under their certain guidelines. For example, the promise is null and void if your password is deemed too easy to guess.

Kelley Berting is a sergeant for the financial crimes section of the Regina Police Service. She said people may not be aware the information they share in obituaries can be too much information.

Many obituaries include a date of birth and other identifying information such as family member’s names and place of death which is often the city the person was residing in.

“In the time of grief and you’re mourning the loss of a loved one, that would never be on the forefront of my mind either,” said Berting. “The average person is not going to be thinking that when they put the obituary in the newspaper of their husband that that information could then be used in a negative way.”

Berting said someone stealing another person’s identity after they have passed away is not common, but she is aware of a few instances. As for what people can do to prevent their identities from being stolen, Berting said when using passwords for online banking or purchases online, people should make sure they’re using a safe and secure internet connection.

Harris explained her family was worried about her wellbeing as she could not stop worrying or thinking about the identity theft. She still sees a counsellor to help cope with some of the trauma she has faced.

Harris said she is still “very leery” of people coming around her house and looks at people differently as a result of the theft.

Another danger in the online world is bullying and harassment.

Chantelle McLeod is an Indigenous woman from Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan. McLeod said she was severely bullied throughout her elementary and high school life due to her light complexion as an Indigenous person.

McLeod said her peers would make fun of her and would say hurtful things like “you’re just a white man, you don’t belong.”

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Chantelle McLeod is an Indigenous woman from Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan.

“It was harsh, because I am fascinated with my culture, I like practicing my culture,” she said. “Not only was I bullied for how I look, I was bullied for just being me.”

McLeod started to get verbally bullied in kindergarten and the cyberbullying started to happen in Grade 7 when she and her peers started to chat on the social media platform Bebo.

As a result of the cyberbullying, McLeod said she tried to commit suicide on “many accounts.”

Social media is a constant presence in everyone’s lives. In our phone survey, 399 out of 498 people said they used social media several times a day. This makes it easier for people to be harassed online, as they are constantly checking their feeds.

According to a survey of 9,000 Saskatchewan high school students conducted by the Saskatchewan Alliance for Youth and Community Well-being in 2015, 2 in 3 students experienced bullying in the previous year and 29 per cent of incidents happened online or in text messages.

In a report from 2017, 5,611 people from Saskatoon elementary schools were surveyed and the study showed that more First Nation students are cyberbullied; 16.2 per cent of First Nations students reported being cyberbullied versus non-First Nation kids who reported 9.4 per cent.

A study done in 2011 by the Canadian Health Journal of Public Health found that 30 per cent of kids on First Nations reserves in Grades 5 to 8 reported being cyberbullied.

“They would also bully me in school and then I would go online after school just to see what my friends were up to,” said McLeod. “My (Bebo) profile was actually public so they had access to comment and do whatever they wanted on my wall and things like that.”

McLeod said her bullies would comment on her Bebo wall and call her ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’. She said the words that were said to her impacted her in a “very harsh way”.

“I have severe anxiety and I have really deep depression,” said McLeod. “I did isolate myself from the world for about two years of my life, I just kind of stayed in my room and didn’t go anywhere, didn’t really communicate with nobody.”

“My mentality just completely deteriorated and got to the point where I felt like I didn’t want to live anymore because they just made me [feel] so worthless,” said McLeod. “Being a light skinned Native on a reservation, it is an automatic target.”

Zach Wall is a Community Program Coordinator for CFS Saskatoon. Wall said it is important to look at the dynamics of bullying to understand why someone might decide to bully others and there are two fundamental elements to it.

“First of all it’s a power dynamic, bullying tends to happen in relationships where there’s someone with a greater amount of social capital than someone else,” said Wall. “The other dynamic is the social element, it turns out that especially in schools and workplaces, it can be a really easy way to gain social capital by bullying other people.”

Wall said cyberbullying can really harm people in the long-term. He said adults who were bullied as teens and youths can have lasting consequences in terms of their social dynamics and can even go as far as affecting their parenting styles.

“Between the ages of like 15 and 24 is a very pinnacle time for identity formation and so when you start being told that you’re worthless in a very important formative stage of your development, that has a long-term impact,” said Wall. “That would lead to things like low self-esteem [which] tends to be correlated with emotional dysregulation.”

When it comes to prevention, Wall thinks teachers need to be aware of the impacts of cyberbullying.

“I think a lot of them are, especially as we talk to teachers now and we go around in schools and do these types of conversations,” said Wall. “Because they’re aware of it, they’re addressing it much faster.”

McLeod is an educator in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, and teaches the same grade she was bullied in. McLeod says she is now applying teachings in her classroom that would have helped her as a kid.

“I am trying to implement no bullying in my classrooms,” she said, “I told [my students] ‘People can go out and play this role like they’re the most happiest people in the world but there are things that do get them down.’”

“I told them right off the bat that I have zero bullying tolerance in my classrooms and this is why, because bullying does lead to people killing themselves and I am a survivor of that.”