Real or Imagination?
White Rabit aims to explain as well as confuse. One part of this mix is the creation of the Amy Noakes character that the stalker is following. Amy represents an everyday person even though I am portraying her as a new celebrity. She shows how private things, such as letters, computer information and other data can be collected.
The reason for making Amy into a new celebrity was to show how easy it can be to create a website with fake elements. For example, on the Amy Noakes website there is a link, at the end of her biography, to Amazon were you can buy her book 'The Truth about Pink Cats and Purple Dogs'. In a sense this is a real Amazon page. To create this page all I had to do was go to Amazon’s website and choose a page that I wanted to use for my mock up.
I chose The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives edited by J.Reid. I chose this book as it has been one of my reference books for this project and has proved very helpful in building up the character of the stalker. The next step was to simply view the page source and copy it. I then pasted it into a new page in Macromedia's Dreamweaver. This let me edit the code, manipulating it into the Amy Noakes Amazon page. I then uploaded it to the Amy Noakes website.
All of the Amazon links work and you can even purchase the book. However, I did not take this to the extreme like some online scams do. I let it link back to Amazon so that the person just gets The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives - J.Reid book in their shopping cart and can cancel out the order with no harm done. If I really wished to scam people using this I would mock up all of the payment parts as well and take the money into my own bank account and then never deliver any poducts. These types of scams really exist. Online banking, PayPal and EBay are all big targets and the scam artists get money by using their names in false contexts. The Amazon link I created aims to demonstrate this.
It has been suggested that I self-publish the Amy Noakes book and then sending Amazon a single copy to stock for real. This would be a good idea for making the Amy Noakes character more real, however, it means the loss of the scam element that the book was created for and so I will leave the page as it is.
The final element that I added to the Amy Noakes website was the Amy Noakes shop. This is where fans can buy merchandise such as clothes, pillows, bags and badges. This shop is a real, live shop and if you buy something it will be delivered. I created the shop using an online system called cafepress.com.
The way this system works is you create the designs and then upload them to your shop space on their server. You can then choose the products that you wish your designs to be printed onto. This whole system is free. However, you are limited to one design on any one product. If you wish to have more than one design on one product you can purchase a monthly subscription allowing this. For my purposes, this web-site, the free shop was suitable.
You make money from your shop when someone buys a product. I have set it to a 25% mark-up on all products. This is my cut, the rest of the money goes to cafepress.com.
There are plenty of other online companies that provide this service and you can have your designs printed onto lots of things. The most popular is T-shirts. These companies let people create the designs and sell them without the expensive outlay of getting things printed and then the storage of the products. This is why they take the majority of the money.
I added the Amy Noakes shop and the Amazon link to the website to build the credibility and reality into the website and Amy as a celebrity. This is another trick often used to scam people online. To provide a creditable link alongside a fraudulent one.
To add another element to the Amy Noakes and stalker story I will create an unoffical Amy Noakes website using Geocities, this is a free website host and builder provided by Yahoo. I decided to create the unoffical version on the Amy Noakes website because if the Stalker was obsessed with Amy and was using his computer to track her and gain information. It would be more thank likely that he would also have created his own site about her.
I have attempted to create this site however my laptop is an Apple PowerBook and the Geocities builder only works on a PC. At present I do not have access to a PC and so can not create the site at this point in time.