Police: Chalfont Woman Cyber Bullied Cheerleaders On Her Daughters Team
Alex Lloyd Gross
Spone
by Alex Lloyd Gross
Raffaela Spone, of Chalfont, is in trouble with the police. She is becoming famous for all the wrong reasons. Police allege that she sent text messages to team mates on her daughters cheer team. “You should kill yourself”. She also is accused of taking photos that were on that team mates social media accounts and using photo manipulation software, Spone made it appear that the teens were vaping and drinking alcohol. They were not. In one instance, the bathing suit of the teenager was edited and skin tone was added to make her appear to be nude. There was no genitalia added or charges would be even more serious, said Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub.
A video was faked and later sent to the cheer team Victory Vipers that showed the victim vaping. When the police were called.
Hilltown Township Police office Matthew Reiss “reviewed the video and found it to be the work of a program that is or is similar to “Deep Fakes,” where a still image can be mapped onto an existing video and alter the appearance of the person in the video to show the likeness of the victim’s image instead.” according to a criminal complaint. Officer Reiss met with the parents of two additional victims in December who reported receiving messages in August in regards to their daughters, showing pictures of the girls with captions “toxic traits, revenge, dating boys, and smoking” and “was drinking at the shore, smokes, pot, and uses ‘attentionwh0re69’ as a screen name.” Police used a series of search warrants to determine information about the phone numbers the messages were sent from, leading them to the IP address that traced back to Spone. The search warrants of devices seized confirmed use of Spone’s cellphone to use the “Pinger” application to download, access and/or manipulate data. This also confirmed the phone numbers and IP addresses previously searched.
No reason was given except that the other girls were on the cheerleading team, and possibly Spone thought that if the videos could cast the girls in a bad light, they would be removed from the team. Spone was charged via summons with three counts each of cyber harassment of a child and harassment, both misdemeanors of the third degree. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for March 30 before Magisterial District Judge Regina Armitage.
