The Person You Located Has Refused Contact
The search worked. You wrote, or called, or knocked, and the answer that came back was some version of do not contact me again. Nothing on this page will help you get around that, because a located person owes no one a reply, and past a clear refusal the attempts stop counting as persistence. This page is about what a refusal actually means, the one statutory route built for exactly this situation, and the point at which a court starts treating repeated contact as something else entirely.
The Honest Answer
Stop, and let the refusal be the outcome. That sentence is unwelcome and it is still the answer, because the entire premise of locating an adult is that you may reach them, not that they must respond. If the matter is personal – a reunion, an estrangement, a birth relative, a friend who dropped out of your life – the useful move is not another message from you but a neutral third party, and in adoption cases several states have built that third party into statute as a confidential intermediary or a mutual-consent registry. If the matter is legal – papers to serve, a debt, an estate, a claim – then refusing to talk to you does not make the matter go away, but the route forward runs through your lawyer and the court, not through more contact attempts. And if you are being told no by someone who once had reason to fear you, treat that as the whole answer. Refusal is sometimes the safety signal itself.
Watch: Why a No Is Where This Page Begins
Just over a minute on the difference between a refusal you can work with and a refusal you must simply accept.
One minute, fifteen seconds
What a Refusal Actually Tells You
Almost every page written for this moment treats the no as a temporary state to be managed. It is more useful to treat it as a fact.
There is a quiet assumption buried in most searching, and it is worth dragging into the light before anything else. The assumption is that finding someone is the hard part and that contact follows from it more or less automatically – that a located person is a reachable person, and a reachable person is a person who will eventually engage. None of that follows. Locating establishes where somebody is. It establishes nothing whatsoever about whether they owe you a conversation. An adult who is alive and competent may decline to speak to a sibling, a parent, a child they placed for adoption, a former spouse, a creditor, a journalist or a long-lost friend, and may do so without giving a reason, without softening it, and without ever revisiting the decision.
Maryland’s Department of Human Services says this out loud on the page describing its own adoption search program, and the phrasing is worth keeping because it comes from an agency whose entire purpose is helping people reconnect: “If people do not want contact it is their right to decline.” That is a state that runs searches, employs trained intermediaries, maintains a registry going back to 1986, and still writes the refusal down as a right rather than as an obstacle. If the institution built to reunite families frames it that way, a page selling research services has no business framing it any other way.
What changes after a clear no is not just the etiquette. It is the legal character of what you do next. Before a refusal, an unanswered letter is an unanswered letter. After one, each further approach is an act taken in the knowledge that it is unwanted, and that knowledge is precisely what converts a series of contacts into something a court can look at as a pattern. You will see the mechanics of that below. The short form is that the refusal is the moment the meter starts running, which is exactly why “one more try” is a much more expensive idea than it feels.
There is also a version of the refusal that is not about you at all, and it deserves naming early rather than as a footnote. Some people go unreachable because a specific person is dangerous to them. From the outside, the woman who has moved twice, kept her number unlisted and declined a message from a half-brother she has never met looks identical to the woman who is simply not interested – and the person asking us to search almost never accepts that they might be the danger. That is not a reason to be suspicious of everyone. It is a reason to treat a refusal as sufficient in itself, without requiring the refuser to justify it, which is the only policy that protects the small number of cases where the stakes are real.
None of this means the story is finished. People change their minds, and both of the statutory schemes described further down are built on that possibility rather than against it. But they are built to let the other person change their mind in their own time, through a neutral channel, without further pressure from you. That is a genuinely different thing from persuading them, and confusing the two is the single most common error we see after a search closes.
First, Work Out Which Refusal You Have
Two situations wear the same words. What follows a no depends almost entirely on which one you are in.
A personal refusal ends the matter unless the other person reopens it. Reunion, estrangement, an old friendship, a birth relative, a half-sibling turned up by a DNA test, a child now grown who was placed decades ago: in every one of these the only thing at stake is a relationship, and a relationship that one side declines does not exist. There is no external body that can compel it and no procedure that produces it. What there can be is a neutral intermediary who holds the door open without standing in it, and in adoption matters that role is written into statute in some states rather than left to goodwill.
A legal refusal is different in kind, because the matter has an existence independent of the conversation. A defendant who will not accept papers, a debtor who will not discuss a balance, an heir who will not respond to an executor, a party who ignores a claim – none of these people have made the case disappear by declining to speak. But the route forward is procedural. It belongs to a lawyer and to a court, and it consists of asking a judge for permission to proceed in a way that does not depend on the other side’s cooperation. Courts have long-established machinery for exactly this; what that machinery is called and what it requires varies by jurisdiction and by the kind of case, which is why the honest thing for us to say is that the route exists and that your counsel is the person to walk it.
The practical test is simple and slightly uncomfortable. Ask what happens if you do nothing at all. If the answer is that you stay estranged and sad, it is a personal matter, and no amount of process will change it. If the answer is that a deadline passes, an estate cannot be distributed, a claim goes unfiled or a judgment goes uncollected, it is a legal matter, and the correct next call is to a lawyer rather than to the person who refused you. People routinely misfile themselves here in both directions: families try to force a legal remedy onto an emotional problem, and litigants keep writing personal appeals to someone who stopped reading months ago.
One thing does not change across the fork. Neither branch permits you to keep contacting someone directly after they have told you to stop. A legal matter gives you a lawful path around the silence; it does not give you a license to knock again. If your lawyer needs the other side served or noticed, that is done through the mechanisms the court recognizes, by people whose job it is, and our part of that is finding a current, verified address to hand to them – which is the whole of what we do when we work with a process server who needs a defendant located, and where it ends.
Personal Matters: The Intermediary Was Built for This Exact Problem
Several states legislated for “one party may want contact and the other may not” decades ago. Most people who need it have never heard of it.
If your situation touches adoption in any way – you were adopted, you placed a child, you are searching for a birth parent, a birth sibling or a relative separated by an adoption – there may be a formal mechanism available to you that is far better suited to a refusal than anything you can do yourself. It has two common forms. A mutual-consent registry is passive: both parties record that they are open to contact, and the state matches them if and only if both have signed up. A confidential intermediary is active: a court appoints a trained, sworn person to search for the other party and ask them, privately, whether they consent – and to report back either way. Neither hands your details to anyone who has not agreed to receive them, and that is the entire point of them.
Because these schemes are creatures of state statute, they differ substantially and we will only describe the two we read in full. Michigan sets its confidential intermediary scheme out at MCL 710.68b. An adult adoptee, an adoptive parent of a minor adoptee, or an adult child of a deceased adoptee may petition the court that entered the final adoption order to appoint an intermediary to search for and contact a “former family member” – defined in the statute as a parent, grandparent, or adult sibling related to the adoptee through birth or adoption by at least one common parent. A former family member may petition in the other direction. Notice how narrow that definition is: it is not a general-purpose people-finding statute, and it will not help with a cousin, an aunt or a friend.
The refusal machinery inside that statute is the part worth reading closely. On receiving a petition, the court must first contact the central adoption registry to see whether a statement is currently on file from the person being sought denying consent to the release of identifying information. If a denial is on file, the appointment does not happen. In other words the person’s recorded no stops the process before any intermediary is ever appointed – the state built the veto in at the front door. Where no denial is on file and an intermediary is appointed, that person swears an oath not to disclose identifying information without written consent, to conduct a reasonable search, and to make a “discreet and confidential inquiry” as to whether the individual is willing to release information or to meet or communicate. If the individual refuses, the statute directs the intermediary to report the refusal to the petitioner and to the court, and there it stops. The same section limits what an intermediary may be paid to a court-approved fee plus reimbursement of actual expenses, which is a useful thing to know before paying anybody who describes themselves as a “search intermediary” outside such a scheme.
Maryland runs a different shape of the same idea. Its Adoption Search, Contact and Reunion Services combine the Mutual Consent Voluntary Adoption Registry – a passive listing of adult adoptees, birth parents and birth siblings, in place since 1986 and holding more than five thousand names – with an active search service in which a trained confidential intermediary is assigned once a record is found. The agency is candid that the registry alone produces few matches, which tells you something honest about how rarely two people happen to sign up in the same decade. Maryland also operates an explicit disclosure veto: for adoptions finalized after January 1, 2000, a person can file a statement that contact is not to be made, and the department maintains it. Crucially, the department also records that a veto can be rescinded if the person changes their mind – the door is closed, not welded.
Two cautions before you go looking for your own state’s version. First, we verified Michigan and Maryland and nothing else, so please do not read the paragraphs above as a national rule; coverage, eligibility, who may petition and what a veto does are all genuinely different from state to state, and several states have no such scheme at all. Start with the court that finalized the adoption or the state’s human-services department, not with a commercial site summarizing all fifty. Second, an intermediary is not a way to make contact happen. It is a way to ask the question properly, once, and to be told the answer without either of you being exposed. If you want the background on where sealed material sits and what is actually obtainable, our guide to searching closed adoption records covers the records side of it.
Where adoption is not involved, no equivalent statute exists and there is no substitute for it. What remains is genuinely ordinary: a letter with a return address and no follow-up, sent once, saying you would welcome contact and will not write again – and then not writing again. A trusted mutual relative or a therapist can carry a message where you cannot. Families who are working through this in the wider estrangement context, rather than the adoption one, will find the practical ground covered in our page on reaching an estranged family member, and the specific and painful case of a grown child who has cut contact is dealt with separately in what to do when an adult child has gone silent.
Legal Matters: Silence Does Not Stop a Case
What the court can do without the other side’s cooperation is real, and it is not something this page is going to teach you to do yourself.
Start with the boundary, because it matters more than the content. Where a refusal sits inside a live legal matter, the answer is a lawyer, and we are not going to write the procedure here. Whether a defendant may be served by an alternative method, what a court requires before it will permit notice by publication, what happens when someone declines to accept documents, how an estate proceeds where an heir will not respond – these are questions with different answers in every jurisdiction, and they are decided by a judge on a record, not by a research firm on a web page. Anything we published would be a guess that read like guidance, and the readers most likely to rely on it are exactly the ones who can least afford to be wrong.
What is safe to say is that the machinery exists. Courts have long recognized that a party who cannot be reached, or who avoids being reached, cannot thereby freeze a case forever, and every jurisdiction has some procedure by which a plaintiff may apply for permission to proceed by a means other than handing papers to a person. Refusing to accept service is a question for a judge, not for us and not for you. The right move on discovering that someone will not engage is to take the evidence of your attempts to your lawyer promptly, because those attempts are usually what the application is built on. The corresponding practical need – a current, verified address that a server or a court filing can rely on – is the part we can lawfully help with, and it is the only part.
Debt collection has its own layer, and it runs the opposite way from what most people expect. Under the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, if a consumer notifies a debt collector in writing that they refuse to pay a debt or that they wish the collector to cease further communication, 15 U.S.C. 1692c(c) requires the collector to stop communicating with that consumer about the debt, with three narrow exceptions: to say that efforts are being terminated, to notify the consumer that a specified remedy which is ordinarily invoked may be invoked, or to notify them that such a remedy is intended. Where the notice is posted, the statute provides that notification is complete on receipt. Read the definitions alongside it, because they do a lot of work: the same subchapter defines a “debt” as an obligation arising from a transaction primarily for personal, family or household purposes, and generally excludes an officer or employee of a creditor collecting in the creditor’s own name from the term “debt collector”. A business-to-business balance and a creditor chasing its own account are not the same situation as a third-party agency chasing a household debt.
Two things follow that are easy to miss. A written cease-communication notice stops the calls; it does not extinguish the debt, and it does not stop the creditor from suing – which is one of the reasons the statute expressly preserves the collector’s ability to say that a remedy is intended. And the same subchapter separately prohibits, at 1692d(5), causing a telephone to ring or engaging any person in telephone conversation repeatedly or continuously with intent to annoy, abuse or harass any person at the called number. If you are on the creditor side of this and your instinct after a refusal is to increase the pressure, that instinct is the one the statute was written about. What the rules do and do not permit on both sides is laid out in our page on what collectors can and cannot do.
For everything in this section, the same sentence applies: this is general information about how these routes exist, not legal advice about your matter, and the difference is not a formality. A page cannot know your jurisdiction, your deadline, your posture or your facts, and the cost of acting on a stranger’s general description of a procedure is usually paid at the worst possible moment.
The Point Where Persistence Stops Being Persistence
Not a scare paragraph. A description of what a pattern of contact after a refusal looks like from the outside.
Most people who keep making contact after being told to stop do not think of themselves as harassing anyone. They think of themselves as someone with an unresolved relationship, or a legitimate claim, or a message that has not yet landed properly. That self-understanding is exactly what the law does not weigh. What gets weighed is the pattern: how many approaches, over what period, after what was said, through how many channels, and what a reasonable person on the receiving end would make of it.
The federal stalking statute is a useful illustration of the shape even though most such cases are prosecuted under state law. 18 U.S.C. 2261A reaches, among other things, using the mail, an interactive computer service, an electronic communication service or any other facility of interstate commerce, with intent to harass or intimidate another person, to engage in a course of conduct that causes, attempts to cause, or would reasonably be expected to cause substantial emotional distress to that person or certain family members. Read that alongside the definitions section it belongs to: 18 U.S.C. 2266(2) defines a “course of conduct” as a pattern of conduct composed of two or more acts, evidencing a continuity of purpose. Two. Not a campaign, not a hundred messages – two acts with a continuity of purpose behind them. Whether a given set of facts satisfies the intent element and every other element of that offense is a question for prosecutors and courts, and nothing here says that two emails is a federal crime. What it does show is how low the countable threshold for a “pattern” is set once intent is in issue.
State harassment and stalking statutes are where most of this actually lives, and they vary too much for us to summarize responsibly; several are drafted around repeated unwanted communication after a request to stop. The civil side matters at least as much as the criminal one, because it is far more commonly used: a pattern of unwanted contact can support an application for a protective or restraining order, and once such an order exists, further contact is a breach of a court order rather than a social misjudgement. That is a meaningful escalation in the consequences, and it can be obtained without a criminal charge ever being brought.
There is a version of this that is not about wrongdoing at all, and it is the one this firm cares about most. Sometimes the refusal is the safety measure. People who have left an abusive relationship, testified against someone, or obtained a protective order routinely go unreachable on purpose, and their whole safety plan rests on staying that way. California, for one, runs a confidential address program through the Secretary of State – Safe at Home, operating since 1999 – which gives participants a substitute mailing address to receive first class, certified and registered mail, and is open to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking, child abduction and elder or dependent adult abuse among others. Other states operate their own programs under their own statutes, and their names and eligibility rules differ. If you are the person who has been located and you did not want to be, that kind of program, together with a victim-services advocate and the court that issued any order you hold, is the right place to take it.
And if you are the person who was refused, hold two facts together without needing to resolve them. You may be entirely well-intentioned. The other person’s reasons are still none of your business, and you are not entitled to test them.
Five Ways Forward After a No, and What Each Actually Produces
Only two of these produce anything at all, and neither of them produces a conversation.
| Route | What it actually produces | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Contacting them again yourself | Nothing you want, and a growing record of unwanted contact after a refusal | Never, once a refusal has been made clearly |
| Confidential intermediary or state registry | A private, one-time question asked by a neutral sworn party, and a truthful answer either way | Adoption-related searches, in states that have legislated for it |
| A single closing letter, then silence | A door left open that costs the other person nothing to walk through, later or never | Personal matters with no statutory route available |
| Your lawyer and the court | A lawful way to proceed that does not depend on the other side engaging | Service, estates, debts, claims – anything with a deadline attached |
| Records research (us) | A verified current address for a lawful purpose, handed to you or your counselBounded | Only where the address itself is the gap, and never to renew contact after a refusal |
| The point of this table | The row most readers arrive wanting is the first one, and it is the only row with no upside at all. Our own row is deliberately the narrowest on the page. | |
We would rather set that out in a table than bury it in a paragraph, because it is the commercially inconvenient part. A firm that finds people for a living has an obvious incentive to describe a refusal as a temporary setback that another search might resolve. It is not one, and the work we take after a no is a much smaller category than the work we are asked for. Where an address genuinely is the gap and the purpose is lawful, that sits within our ordinary skip tracing and public-records research; where the gap is consent, no search closes it.
Refusals We Are Asked About Most Often
Six versions of the same moment, and what changes between them.
“She replied once, then blocked me”
A single reply is not consent to a correspondence, and blocking is a refusal expressed in the clearest medium available to her. Treat the block as the message it is rather than as a technical obstacle to route around.
“He said no, but his wife answered for him”
You have a refusal, delivered by someone in a position to know. Going around the messenger to reach him directly is precisely the escalation that turns a declined approach into a pattern of contact.
“A DNA match refused, so I found her sister”
Contacting relatives of someone who declined you is not a workaround, it is an expansion. It also exposes information about her that she did not choose to share, to people who may not know it.
“He refuses to take the papers”
The case is unaffected and the answer is your lawyer, today rather than next month. Keep a clear record of what you attempted and when, because that record is usually what an application to the court is built from.
“She sent a letter telling us to stop calling”
On a household debt handled by a third-party collector, that written notice engages the federal cease-communication rule and the calls stop. Route the letter to counsel or compliance the day it arrives, not the week after.
“They moved and left no address on purpose”
Where the disappearance was deliberate and you are the person it was aimed at, that is not a research problem. Ask honestly whether the answer you want is one they already gave you by leaving.
What Happens If You Bring Us a Case After a Refusal
Four steps, two of which frequently end with us saying no.
You tell us what already happened
Not just the name. What contact was attempted, what came back, and in whose words. We reply within 24 hours, and on this topic the reply is often that we are not the right service and that nothing needs to be paid.
We test the purpose, not the sentiment
Every file runs on a stated lawful purpose recorded before work starts. “They refused and I want to reach them anyway” is not one, however sympathetic the history behind it, and it is where a substantial share of these inquiries stop.
We work only the lawful record set
Public filings, property and court indexes, and licensed sources used inside their permissible-use rules. No pretexting, no impersonating anyone to a relative or an employer, no private account contents, and no live device location.
You get the sourcing, and the limits in writing
Where we deliver, you get what was found and where each part came from, so your counsel can weigh it. Where the honest answer is that the refusal is the answer, you get that instead, and we would rather say it early.
Our Limits, Written Down Rather Than Implied
On a page about someone else’s right to say no, a vague boundary would be worse than none.
We are a public-records and skip-tracing research firm. We are not licensed private investigators and do not hold ourselves out as any: no surveillance, no doorstep work, no following anyone, and nothing that depends on watching a person rather than reading a record. We also cannot reach what is not lawfully available – no live handset location, no message or mailbox contents, no account access, no private channel that other firms mysteriously have. Where a competitor implies otherwise, they are describing either a fantasy or an offense.
Every file runs on a stated lawful purpose, recorded before the work begins rather than reconstructed afterwards. Where a source is regulated – driver and vehicle records under the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, financial identifiers under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – we use it only where a permissible use genuinely applies, and we record which one it was. We do not use pretext. No one here telephones an employer, a landlord, a relative or a hospital pretending to be someone else to shake information loose, and we will not coach a client through doing it. We do not obtain private financial account contents – no balances, no statements, no transaction histories.
We are not a consumer reporting agency and nothing we produce is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Our work may not be used to decide employment, credit, insurance underwriting, housing or tenancy, professional licensing, or a government benefit. Those decisions require a consumer reporting agency together with the disclosures, written authorization and adverse-action steps the Act builds around them. If that is what a matter actually needs, we say so and decline rather than sell something that cannot lawfully do the job.
Now the refusals that belong specifically to this page, because they are the reason it exists. We will not run a second search for the purpose of routing around a no. We will not supply an address to someone whose stated aim is to keep contacting a person who has told them to stop. We will not accept an instruction to approach a refuser’s relatives, neighbors or employer on your behalf in order to reopen a channel they closed. And where the pattern suggests that the person went quiet in order to be safe from the person asking – a protective order, a separation, a report to police, a move nobody was told about – we decline and do not reopen the file, whoever is asking and however the request is framed. Somebody unreachable because they are frightened and somebody unreachable because they are finished can look identical from where we sit, which is exactly why the line sits where it does. A refused case we should have taken costs somebody a disappointment; a taken case we should have refused can cost somebody far more.
Everything here is general information and not legal advice. The service, notice, harassment, protective-order and adoption-records rules touched on above are creatures of state law and vary substantially; we have named only the sources we read, and we have deliberately not written a procedure for any of them. Where you need a ruling rather than a record – permission to serve by another method, an order about an estate, a protective order, or access to sealed material – the person to ask is a lawyer admitted where the matter sits.
Who Arrives at This Page
Usually within a week of the refusal, and usually looking for permission to try once more.
Adoptees and birth kin
The group the intermediary statutes were actually written for.
Estranged parents and children
Where the refusal is the newest chapter of a long story, not the first.
Old friends and first loves
Decades of curiosity, met by a person who moved on and meant it.
Executors and estate counsel
An heir who will not answer, and a distribution that cannot wait forever.
Litigants with papers to serve
A defendant who will not take documents, and a deadline that will not move.
People who were located
Reading this to work out what protection exists. It is on the page for you too.
The last card is not decoration. A fair proportion of the traffic to a page like this comes from the person who was found, not the person who searched, and writing the boundaries in language that reads the same from both directions is the only way to be honest with either.
What You Can Hold Us To
Two commitments, both narrower than the industry norm and both meant literally. The first: we will tell you before you spend anything if what you are describing is a consent problem rather than an address problem, because those are the cases where a research firm can take money and deliver nothing you can use. The second: any address we do deliver comes with the records behind it, so you or your counsel can weigh the sourcing instead of trusting a summary. What we will never do is treat a refusal as a brief we have been hired to overcome.
Questions That Follow a Refusal
They refused once. Can I try again in a year?
Only if the refusal was ambiguous, and most are not. “Not now” is different from “do not contact me again”; if you were given the second, a further approach a year later is still an approach after a refusal, and the interval does not reset anything. The better construction is to have left, in your one closing message, a way for them to reach you if they ever want to – and then to leave the initiative entirely with them. Where adoption is involved, a state registry or intermediary scheme is the proper mechanism for keeping that door open without you touching it again.
What is a confidential intermediary, in plain terms?
A trained, sworn person appointed by a court to search for someone and ask them privately whether they consent to contact or to the release of identifying information, then report back either way. Michigan’s version at MCL 710.68b requires the intermediary to swear not to disclose identifying information without written consent, to conduct a reasonable search, and to make a discreet and confidential inquiry. If the person refuses, the statute directs the intermediary to report that refusal to the petitioner and the court. It is a way of asking properly, once, rather than a way of getting a yes.
Does every state have a registry or intermediary scheme?
No, and we are only prepared to describe the two we read in the official text: Michigan’s confidential intermediary provisions and Maryland’s Adoption Search, Contact and Reunion Services with its Mutual Consent Voluntary Adoption Registry. Coverage, eligibility, who may petition and what a recorded objection does differ substantially between states, and some have nothing of the kind. Start with the court that finalized the adoption or the state human-services department rather than a commercial site summarizing all fifty jurisdictions at once.
Can someone permanently block being contacted through these schemes?
In the two states we examined, yes, and the mechanism sits at the front of the process rather than the end. Michigan requires the court, on receiving a petition, to check the central adoption registry for a statement currently on file from the person sought denying consent to the release of identifying information; where one is on file, no intermediary is appointed. Maryland maintains disclosure vetoes for adoptions finalized after January 1, 2000, and records that a veto may be rescinded if the person changes their mind later.
He refuses to accept service. Does that end the lawsuit?
No, and this is the point at which to call your lawyer rather than to keep trying. Courts have procedures allowing a party to apply for permission to proceed by means that do not depend on the other side cooperating, but what is available, what a judge requires first and how it is applied for differ by jurisdiction and by case type. That makes it a question for counsel and the court, not for a research firm. Keep a dated record of every attempt you made, because that record is usually what such an application rests on.
Someone told us in writing to stop contacting them about a debt. Now what?
Where the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act applies, 15 U.S.C. 1692c(c) requires a debt collector who receives written notice that the consumer refuses to pay or wants communication to cease to stop communicating about that debt, subject to three narrow exceptions covering notice that efforts are ending or that a specified remedy may be or is intended to be invoked. The definitions matter: the statute addresses obligations arising from transactions primarily for personal, family or household purposes, and generally excludes an officer or employee of a creditor collecting in the creditor’s own name. Take the letter to counsel or compliance and treat it as a stop instruction, not a negotiation.
At what point does contacting someone become harassment?
That is state law in most cases and it varies too much to answer nationally, so treat what follows as an illustration of shape rather than a rule for your situation. The federal stalking statute at 18 U.S.C. 2261A turns on a course of conduct undertaken with intent to harass or intimidate, and the definitions section it belongs to, 18 U.S.C. 2266(2), defines a course of conduct as a pattern composed of two or more acts evidencing a continuity of purpose. Separately, unwanted contact can support a civil protective order without any criminal charge. The practical answer is that the risk starts at the refusal, not at some later count of messages.
I am the person who was found. What can I do?
Say no once, clearly and in a form you can keep a copy of, and then stop engaging – a reply to every message is what makes a channel feel alive. If contact continues, keep dated records of each approach, because a pattern is what an application for a protective order is built on, and speak to a victim-services advocate or a lawyer where you feel unsafe. Several states run address-confidentiality programs; California’s Safe at Home, run by the Secretary of State since 1999, gives participants a substitute mailing address for first class, certified and registered mail. Rules and eligibility differ, so ask about the program in your own state.
Not Sure Which Side of the Fork You Are On?
Describe what you asked for and what came back, and we will tell you plainly whether this is an address problem we can lawfully help with, a matter for your lawyer, or a refusal that deserves to be the end of it. Most of these end in the third answer, and we would rather say so before anything is opened than after.
Put the situation to our team
