A 43-year-old Spanish Fork woman will spend the next year in federal prison for cyberstalking two men she met on online dating sites, after prosecutors say she spent years harassing them publicly and privately, filing false police reports, and even trying to trick a court into issuing a protective order against one of them using misleading evidence.
U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart handed down the 12-month sentence for Kailin Wang, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which said the case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Joey L. Blanch under U.S. Attorney Melissa Holyoak, with help from the FBI's Salt Lake City Field Office and the San Francisco Police Department. Wang pleaded guilty to two counts of cyberstalking in September 2025, according to KSL, which reported that she will also serve three years of probation once she's released. She was originally indicted in May 2024 on two counts of interstate cyberstalking and two counts of false statements or representations, the outlet reported.
A Pattern That Started With Online Dating
Wang met one of the men, identified in court filings as Victim 1, on a dating site in 2018, and met both male victims through dating platforms as far back as 2017, per the KSL report. What followed, prosecutors say, was a sustained campaign in which Wang used email accounts, social media profiles and phone numbers to send communications targeting Victim 1 and his family, tagging his friends, relatives and employers in an effort to harass and intimidate him. She also made false and defamatory internet postings about Victim 1 and his family, according to the same report.
The harassment wasn't limited to public posts. Court records cited by KSL describe Wang making false allegations of criminal conduct against the victims and using misleading evidence in an attempt to obtain a protective order against one of them. Prosecutors say she threatened the second victim with death or destruction. Victims reported Wang's behavior to law enforcement, but the reports didn't deter her — instead, according to the Department of Justice, her response was to escalate.
Turning the FBI's Own Reporting System Against Her Victims
Court records described in the Department of Justice statement show Wang filed three separate false reports with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, falsely alleging that the two men were conspiring together to harass and impersonate her online — despite no evidence the two victims had ever known each other. It's a striking detail given the scale of the system she tried to exploit: IC3 fields nearly 3,000 complaints a day and logged 859,532 complaints totaling more than $16.6 billion in reported losses in 2024 alone, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The portal, established in May 2000, has logged more than 9 million cumulative public complaints.
Federal court records indicate that when victims tried to report Wang's harassment to police, her behavior escalated into filing false criminal allegations and pursuing court protective orders built on misleading evidence, according to KSL's reporting on the case. Wang also pleaded guilty to misdemeanor false written statement and forgery charges in Utah's 3rd District Court, the outlet reported, and prosecutors describe a pattern of filing complaints specifically meant to harass and intimidate the men — at times falsely claiming she herself was the one being stalked.
An Arrest Tracked to a Utah Restaurant
Wang was arrested by Orem Police on an FBI hold on May 23, 2024, after federal law enforcement tracked her to a Utah restaurant following a sealed indictment issued earlier that month, according to a report from Michael Volpe's Substack. Federal prosecutors initially sought her detention, citing ongoing harassment risks, but U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart granted her pretrial release under strict conditions on July 3, 2024, per court filings on GovInfo.
A Years-Long Legal Battle Across Three States
This wasn't Wang's first entanglement with the courts over her conduct toward Victim 1. Custody and restraining order disputes played out across California, Utah and New York, and Wang was arrested by San Francisco authorities in October 2019 amid those earlier proceedings, according to the Metropolitan News-Enterprise. In January 2021, a San Francisco Superior Court judge went so far as to declare Wang a vexatious litigant — a designation that restricts someone from filing new court actions without prior judicial approval. She was also convicted in New York in 2013, according to KSL. Wang shares a minor child with Victim 1, who KSL reports now has full custody.
Federal cyberstalking under 18 U.S.C. § 2261A carries a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison per count, and that maximum can double for repeat offenders under a related statute, according to Eisner Gorin LLP. Wang's 12-month sentence falls well short of that ceiling. As part of her sentence, she cannot communicate or interact with the victims or their family members without permission from a probation officer, must not take any action to obtain their addresses, must comply with special probation conditions designed to protect them, and must abide by any protective or restraining orders issued by any court. She's also required to notify future intimate partners of her conviction.
Prosecutors say the years of harassment caused the victims, their friends, and their families substantial emotional distress. It remains unclear whether any civil restitution or additional state-level sanctions are pending now that Wang's federal case has concluded.
