A mother accused of secretly cyberbullying her teenage daughter for more than a year has been seized by police.
School basketball coach Kendra Gail Licari, 42, used a virtual private network to make it look as if her daughter was being catfished by friends and classmates.
Now she is was facing multiple charges after astonished officers uncovered her role in the sick scheme.
Licari’s daughter – whose identity has not been disclosed by local media – reportedly received hundreds of texts and calls since 2021.
She was entirely unaware that her mother was behind the scheme and even asked for her help.
But when her mother tried to brazen it out by reporting the case to police, she found herself at the heart of the investigation.
Police experts cracked her VPN and tracked down the texts to Licari’s IP addresses. They arrested her on Monday, 12th December.
Licari, who at the time worked as a girls’ basketball coach at her daughter’s high school, reportedly masked her local network using a virtual private software.
She also used several different numbers and area codes to give her daughter the impression that the messages were sent by her peers.
Isabell County Prosecutor David Barberi said: “By and large it was mostly just harassing-type text messages, demeaning, demoralising, and just mean texts.
“When the case first came into our office, it was bizarre and almost hard to believe.”
Other than her own daughter, Licari had catfished and harassed her daughter’s then-boyfriend for reasons unknown to media.
Barberi added: “We’re talking about several hundreds of text messages, over 1,000 pages of discovery in the case.
‘Someone else coined the term, but they called it a version of ‘cyber Munchausen’s syndrome’ in a sense that this seems to be the type of behavior where you’re making somebody feel bad or need you in their life because of this behavior.”
Following her arrest was reportedly charged with two counts of stalking a minor, two counts of using a computer to commit a crime, and one count of obstruction of justice.
She was set free on Monday after paying a USD 5,000 (GBP 4,114) bond, but is due back in court on 29th December.
