My sister is convinced an online group is stalking her church and family.

My [45F] younger sister [42F] is a pastor’s wife and homeschool mom. She and her husband are VERY traditional/conservative fundamentalist Christians.

Her husband’s brother is also a pastor, and this brother has a daughter who I’ll call C, who is my sister’s niece by marriage. In 2018, C fell out of the faith and went no contact with the whole family. Since then she’s become a very outspoken feminist/liberal and developed a decent following on social media, where she shares her experiences growing up and speaks out against sexism in the church. From what I’ve heard my sister did not get along well with C when she was still part of the family.

Recently I found out from my young niece that my sister has been having fears about a “group” stalking their church and family for many months, and that she had told her she can’t ever talk about this “group” with anyone outside the family. I inquired my sister further about this and after some pressing she told me everything.

Apparently my sister found C’s Reddit account a while back, and discovered she posts on some subreddits that make fun of/“snark” on various fundamentalist Christians who are prominent on social media and in the news. Though C has never posted anything about my sister’s family, my sister has this theory that in 2022, she messaged a bunch of other people on those subreddits lots of private info and gossip about her husband’s church and their family; and that over time all these people developed a weird obsession with them and together formed this group that she’s been talking about.

Some other details she provided about this “group”: * C is the de facto “leader” of the group. * There are currently 50-100 members. * Though the group started out on Reddit, it spread and gained a following on other sites such as 4chan and the dark web. * All the members communicate on Discord or some similar app and are located all over the country. * They have hired people to infiltrate their church/pass information to them. They have also hired PIs to look into them. * This group spends an enormous amount of time gossiping about them (her family + church members), mocking and “snarking” on them, making offensive memes about them, and snooping into their private lives. * The group plays all sorts of elaborate and malicious pranks on their church and family, and she attributes a bunch of strange occurrences and things that have gone wrong to them * While many of the group’s members are liberal, many of them (especially the ones from 4chan) are also “racists and incels” (in her words) * Some of the group’s members are also sexual predators who are interested in her and the kids. When my sister and her family returned home from their weeklong Christmas visit to us, she claims a bunch of photos in their family albums were rearranged in a different order than before they left. She’s convinced these group members hired a professional burglar off the dark web to take their albums and photocopy all photos of her and the kids for them to have.

My sister has shown me zero solid evidence of any of this. She claims to have done a bunch of “calculations” of the odds of certain events happening that she says “proves” this group exists.

My sister has never been paranoid like this about anything else. She is an exceptionally intelligent person and to my knowledge has never been diagnosed with anything (though I’m nearly 100% certain she’s on the autism spectrum, and has social anxiety). Is there any possibility a group effort like this could be carried out (and if so, how could they be discovered and exposed) or is this all in her head?