High Tech Exhibitionism
Ah great, a short-but-spicy piece to get us back into the blogging swing of things! From the Danish press this time: Berlingske Tidende has a notable account (taken from the Danish press agency, Ritzau) about standards of after-the-sale service provided in the Danish retail sector.
The article is actually entitled Flasher by Video Mobile Telephone, and tells the tale of a 40-year-old salesman in a mobile telephone store in Hillerod (a suburb of Copenhagen) who has confessed to the authorities to more than one hundred violations of public decency. Women who came to his store to purchase a mobile telephone with video capabilities could usually look forward to seeing him again, for he would take advantage of the telephone number information he had about them to take the initiative and call them. The problem was not so much that they were seeing him again, but that they were seeing him again in their new video phones naked. And he just wouldn’t stand there, either; he tended to, shall we say, use the occasion to handle his merchandise, by which I really mean “manhandle,” I guess.
This is Denmark, though, after all, and the accused was released on his own recognizance after interrogation. (I do hope they remembered to relieve him of his mobile telephone!) Still, as the article sternly ends, he can certainly “look forward to legal consequences.”
UPDATE: Another day passes, and the Berlingske Tidende editors are still interested in this story. Only they still haven’t quite reached the point where they’ll assign one of their own reporters to it; the account contained in this update (“Over 100 Women Exposed to Mobile-Flasher”) they credit to the Frederiksborg Amts Avis which, with all respect, really seems to be basically your run-of-the-mill pissant local-news newspaper. (No, EuroSavant will certainly not add it to the site’s Danish newspaper coverage list.)
Be that as it may . . . any further juicy details? Not really. The article recounts how around 100 women have complained about those specific performances by the suspect in their video mobile phone screens that they never expected to see, while the actual total of victims is reckoned to be considerably higher because of the natural reluctance in such a case to report the harassment. But the original Ritzau article essentially also said that. This new article does add details about how tough it was to track the offender down, since he was using an unregistered calling-card, so that investigators had to put together evidence about where the various calls had been placed to pin down the perpetrator.
