Your Neighbor's Secret Life Online

Protecting Families from Internet Conmen,
Scammers and Predators

by Stephen Dean

Who can resist a real life secret? In the online world that most Americans are living in, many computer users are also living secret lives: e-mail addresses that real-life friends don’t know about, screen names that frequent certain chat rooms which real friends know nothing about, bank accounts hidden from spouses, text messages traded between people who cannot communicate in any other way.

They’re all surprisingly common. Among men and women, young and old, computer novices and chat addicts, these secret lives are being lived every hour or every day. Your Neighbor’s Secret Life Online is a gripping account of real people with real cyber secrets. Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist Stephen Dean has spent the last five years immersed in researching behavior on the World Wide Web. These secrets emerge during this extensive reporting, and through the trust people place in him because of his widely accepted role as an Internet authority.

Parents reveal terrifying secrets affecting their children as they turn to Dean for advice; police investigations are launched because of this work, yielding even more intricate tales; and the viewers nationwide let this journalist behind the curtain where they would never think of allowing their own friends and family. These personalities will leap from the pages as readers think about their own friends, co-workers and neighbors having similar secrets.

Stephen Dean is a Peabody Award winning investigative journalist and 22-year veteran of broadcast news, currently serving as the lead investigative reporter for KPRC-TV in Houston, Texas, where he has worked since 2001. His standout reporting on Internet crimes has captured worldwide headlines, with first word and in-depth reporting on the nation’s largest-ever child pornography round-up, notoriously known as “Operation Candyman”. Dean was one of the first reporters in the country to wage war on Internet predators. He won the Peabody in 2002 for his reporting on rape in the military, which prompted Congress to change federal law. Mr. Dean lives in Houston.

A New Horizon Press Release
Self-help/Social Issues
5½ x 8¼, 224 pages
LC# 2006923974, world rights
ISBN-13: 978-0-88282-294-5 (pb), $15.95