A South Florida attorney accused of using hi-tech devices to stalk and harass his ex-girlfriend for seven months made his first appearance in court Wednesday, where he was given a $262,000 bond.
Grant Sarbinoff, 37, was also ordered on house arrest with an ankle monitor and will have to surrender his travel documents if he bonds out of jail, a judge ordered.
Sarbinoff spent the night in jail following his arrest Tuesday on multiple charges including stalking, making harassing phone calls and unlawful use of a communications device.
An arrest warrant said Sarbinoff installed a tracking device on his ex's car and called her hundreds of times using Spoofcard, a service that disguises caller ID. The attorney also mounted a Spy Tech GPS tracker onto the victim's vehicle and followed her to several locations, the warrant said.
The victim, who is also an attorney, met the the suspect on the dating app Tinder back in November 2015. The couple dated for nearly a year until police said Sarbinoff broke it off abruptly. Despite the breakup, the lawyer contacted the victim nearly every day until his arrest, the warrant said.
"Inane things but when done repeatedly really rise to level of stalking and went beyond that, there was severe ID theft and he was using ID of friends and colleagues to reach out to her and veil his appearance," said the victim's attorney, Matthew Karp.
Sarbinoff accessed his ex's computer without her permission to impersonate her online and tried to gain access to the victim's Hulu, Etsy, Eventbrite, Opentable, Birchbox, HBO, Kayak and many other accounts, the warrant said. He's also accused of shutting off her power with FPL by unlawfully accessing her account.
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"This is more of an emotional abuse type thing because you don't know where that person is. Are they in your phone, are they in your car, are they in your accounts? It's a very haunting type of abuse," Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said.
In bond court, the judge said Sarbinoff had previous cases of stalking other women in the Midwest. The judge also said there are around 20 people whose names Sarbinoff allegedly used to impersonate when calling his ex.
Sarbinoff resided in Miami Beach but has since moved. He's been a lawyer since 2010.
