To skip right to the main point of the story, scroll to “The Spoofing Incident.”
Throughout 2023, my phone stopped receiving unwanted correspondence whenever Luke Wenke went to jail. As soon as the judge remanded him into custody, it marked the start of a break from harassing texts, hang-up calls, and calls from someone who sat there and mouth-breathed into the receiver while refusing to speak.
The text messages often came from suspected burner numbers (i.e. TextNow, TextFree, Google Voice — I believe it was something along those lines), while the calls either came from unfamiliar phone numbers or private numbers. I also think that one of the antagonising messages I received might’ve come from Wenke’s real phone number, but I’m not sure.
No one I know except Luke Wenke is this preoccupied with my alleged “lifestyle”:
The harassment began shortly after my birthday in late spring (a little less than three months after Luke Wenke’s release from federal prison), and I don’t think this was a coincidence. It also started shortly after Luke Wenke was charged with his first probation violation for contacting his cyberstalking victim, which I also don’t think was a coincidence. I think he either noticed it was around the time of my birthday and/or had been extremely sternly cautioned against contacting his cyberstalking and decided he needed to fill that space with another target while temporarily backed off from the other victim.
History Repeats Itself Yet Again
This wasn’t the first time Luke Wenke ever harassed me, but it was the first time I suspected him of contacting me directly since before he went to prison. I received the following text message (and sent the following response) in the spring of 2021, at the exact same time when several other people received texts from the same number claiming to be Carl Paladino.
Anyone familiar with the “Topix Drama” probably understands why I think Luke Wenke sent this message:
The Obvious Pattern of a Broken Record
I notified police about the harassment during the summer of 2023, but they weren’t keen to investigate a suspected burner number unless the correspondence became explicitly threatening, which it hadn’t. I felt extremely bothered, alarmed, annoyed, and intimidated, but that didn’t matter.
(If I had known at the time that one of the messages might’ve come from Wenke’s real phone number, I would’ve mentioned it to law enforcement. But I was unaware, and I had assumed that Wenke was smart enough not to contact me without disguising his number. Now I know that I grossly overestimated him.)
Meanwhile, with the exception of the two-month break Luke Wenke gave me following his release from prison, the unwanted calls and text messages came like clockwork. For example, on June 20th, 2023, after receiving harassing correspondence for several days in a row (and from various phone numbers), the contact abruptly stopped. I later learned that Luke Wenke was remanded to the Chautauqua County Jail that very day for allegedly violating his probation.
Luke Wenke found other ways to harass me through technology. Within days of his release from the Chautauqua County Jail on August 10th of that year, I received a text message from Wenke’s mother reminding me that she knows my address (which is public information, but I perceived the message as an attempt to scare or upset me and a thinly veiled threat to doxx me, which Wenke was threatening to do in his social media posts).
Later that day, the Olean police called me and asked me to clarify the nature of my issues with Luke Wenke. I briefly explained the situation and the officer politely told me to continue maintaining no contact. I’m still unsure of exactly why the cops called me, but I know it was because Luke Wenke complained, and I’m guessing he tried to file bogus charges against me.
Wanting to get in front of any similar future occurrences, I emailed the police chief a comprehensive collection of evidence and a more detailed explanation about my efforts to be left alone by Wenke. The police seemed very sympathetic to my circumstances and I haven’t had any issues with them ever since, so I’m guessing they found me credible.
The Spoofing Incident
On December 8, 2023, the judge overseeing Luke Wenke’s case released him from jail on an ankle monitor while he awaited sentencing for a probation violation conviction. He would be sent back to jail less than a week later, but he managed to sufficiently wreak havoc on mine and other peoples’ lives during his six days on GPS supervision.
In keeping with his usual tendencies, Wenke started going buck wild on social media the morning after his release from jail. And, of course, the posts were extremely inflammatory. And, of course, his very first Tweet (and many afterward) was directed at me.
That entire week, I was too mentally anguished to work (even though I couldn’t afford not to). I felt defeated and plagued by a permanent parasite whose sole purpose was to suck the sanity and joy out of me. After mailing my first-ever letter to the judge, I stopped at a grocery store for some indulgences, which I planned to shovel in my face while watching 90 Day Fiancé.
During my shopping trip, I set my cell phone in the same place as always: in my cart facing up, unobstructed by any other items. It was on silent, and by the time I noticed a family member calling me, I had missed three or four previous calls from that person and a number I didn’t recognize.
When I answered, my seemingly frantic family member asked me if I had called the police and if I was okay. I said I hadn’t called the police and that everything was fine. My family member said they had received a call from the police, who had tried (and were unable) to reach me after I placed an emergency call. I called back the number from my missed calls that I didn’t recognise, and it was some sort of dispatch line.
The dispatcher was 100 percent convinced I had dialled 911. When I denied it, she snottily insisted I must’ve “butt dialled.” To this day, there is no evidence in my phone itself or in my phone records of this call being placed from my device. Not to mention, I had owned my phone for three years when this happened (I still have it). I had literally never butt dialled or accidentally called anyone from it, and at the time the call was supposedly made, I had not even touched my phone in a good 20 minutes or so. It wasn’t being jostled around, no one else touched it, and nothing even brushed against it. And, like I said, my call log and records do not depict any 911 calls from that day.
The “number labelled “Family member” is all the same person. As you can see, my phone had no activity for about 25 minutes after I placed a call to said family member. Out of the blue, at 5:31, I started receiving calls from both the emergency dispatch line and the family member. This call log matches up with my phone records. Bottom line, I did not dial 911 that day.
“That’s Impossible”
So apparently, the first time I ever “butt dialled” 911 from my phone (while not even touching it) over a three-plus year period of ownership, it also just happened to be within days of Luke Wenke being released from jail. And it just happened to occur during a narrow six-day window before he got sent back to jail for acting like himself. That sounds like an extremely unlikely coincidence to me, but hey. If you ask the authorities, there’s no other explanation.
I’m not super tech-savvy, and several people have told me it would’ve been impossible for Luke Wenke to spoof an emergency line using my phone number. But I’m 100 percent certain that I did not call 911, including by accident, and again, the timing is way too coincidental for me to think that I called 911 without noticing for the first time ever, in my entire life, while Wenke was obsessively posting about me on social media. And that these two sets of circumstances don’t overlap at all.
To this day, I don’t know what to make of the incident. I’m inclined to believe that the police knew what they were talking about when they said someone can’t imitate my phone number while calling their emergency line, but I also know I’m not imagining the distinct absence of this call on my phone and in my records. It still bothers me to not know how that happened, and I don’t think I ever will. But I can’t ignore the timing of the incident — namely the fact that it happened while Wenke was out of jail, and that any and all weird phone activity stopped once he was locked back up.
I also suspect that Luke Wenke spoofed me due to the nature of some of his previous threats.
During times when Luke Wenke wasn’t in jail in the months leading up to the spoofing incident, he often made social media posts alluding to possible plans to SWAT my family’s home. He reiterated this alleged desire on multiple occasions, and he worded himself vaguely enough to avoid being outright threatening. He knows how to toe that line and seems to very much enjoy doing it, since he’s way more coherent than the federal authorities give him credit for.
Based on the nature of these implied threats in Wenke’s online posts, it seemed clear to me that he fantasized about eliciting a disruptive emergency response at my family’s property. He also frequently threatened to doxx me, which further suggests that he wanted to cause problems at the address where he thought I was residing at the time. All things considered, it wouldn’t be out-of-character for Luke Wenke to want to spoof me, to cause chaos and possibly to generate a police response to the residence. But the police had their mind made up about the situation before I could get a word in edgewise, so if he did do something diabolical, he got away with it (like usual). And it is what it is, I guess.