There are several different methods, and several different types of people I have encountered doing this kind of thing over the years.

1 type - the jealous 'friend' who wants to be more. Another is the [insert superhero term here] - that stands up to [someone mean, someone disagree, someone whatever] that has wronged someone else they like in the chats. The spurned ex-lover / friend. The firm "X is evil, and if you defend Y then you deserve blah blah' - collateral damage is just a thing that is needed to defend the world from Z..

Of course we also have some 'pro/am' oh whats the term, 'ewhoring' I think if google still shows results from the various blackhat forums - gives broke people instructions on how to befriend then blackmail in chats in general - we have traced dozens of these scammers to those types of forums.

A few other types we have encountered - but on to some of the hows we fought.

Some have used firewall software, others used flash-jacking programs to pull a list of ips that connected to our group chat rooms. We fought that in different ways.

Then we discover that our system for displaying avatars that allowed people to use an an image hosted third party - well that got abused - the tecky peeps could host their avatar on a server they could see access logs or software that showed views / access logs - so they could get ips that way.

We later discovered some hackers using a similar method by posting images in the chat room - then looking at access logs for those - they would then move to private chats or smaller chat rooms and do the same - thus limiting the ips to check.

For a while I did not believe these things were actually happening. We coded a ghost/invisible admin option - when peeking in on some private chats I saw they could tell immediately a third ip addy was in the chat at the time.. that was helpful in discovering some of the methods they were showing friends how to get info on our users though.

When I saw messages like 'screw person B - don't worry I'm going through their myphoto and docs right now.. I thought yeah right.. but then proof came that yes indeed they were doing that at that exact moment.

I believe much of this was before shodan - but not sure.

Anyhow they would do ip tracing - and use that info to scare people - sometimes they would find the person's ip leads to an exploitable router and break in and gather data. Sometimes they used that data to ruin lives - emails, CCs - all that.. that's when I discovered some lists of 'evilthings you can do when you have someone's addy or/and phone number - including the 4chnFb1PatyVan and crap.

If they couldn't break into their router (I estimated about 65% of our users had outdated routers/firmware over the years) - they would go into social hacking if the 'scare them by showing you know their city / location by ip' was not enough..

A common thing that started occurring was facebook friending - then getting / trading naughty pics - then gathering the list of all their fbook friends / associates and sharing said pics with all of them if not send X paypal for example..

Fighting all this led to even bigger battles sometimes - where we had to switch hosting a bunch of times cuz increasing DDOS is easy. Getting caught in the middle of some anony vs [group they hate] - is not a fun place to be I've found.

There's been some other things all those sorts of things had led to - but trying not to write a book here.

Anyhow, skipping several stories.. here lately my biggest pain in the butt has been this 15 year old in Canada. The worst troll in our history - he may be 17 by now.. apparently has lawyers as parents, and uses their money to have dozens of VPN services at the click of a button.

He comes in, makes several accounts.. chats for a while - gets mad - starts posting things that border CP depending on the juristiction and interpretation I guess - pisses off 100% of our users- and we ban him - then he's back - and we ban ip subnets - and he comes back with 6 logins.. we ban those..

It's led to us banning tens of thousands of ips - writings hundreds of letters to various ISPs - getting in touch with authorities and lawyers and all sorts of things.

Well he keeps coming back now and again and ruins things in the chats in many ways - harassing some people, exploiting others.

If we didn't have moderators that could view ips of our visitors we'd never know who was who and what blocks of ips to ban just to make some peace.

Wish we had access to the kind of VPN blocking lists that the big players have - that would help.

Oh there are many more things in relation to all this we've been through over the years. I love giving chat options to the world to share and connect, but it's been a struggle so many times.

Moderation tools are oftentimes overlooked for other features I've found.

Just yesterday I saw a news story something like during zoom class some school kids all watched some abuse or sex or something start - and the teacher was like 'logoff, logoff now!' - and I wondered - does zoom not have kick/ban/block/report / ip save / things like that built in? I have not used it in years, and never used it with more than 2 people at a time so never checked.