Bethan Sims had leant on her phone while falling asleep in 2019 when she accidentally sent a one-letter text message on a dating app to Neal Hancock. That mistake would spell six years of hell for her entire family. Hancock, 39, believing Bethan to be interested in him, sent her numerous messages in response on the app, Plenty of Fish. When Bethan didn’t reply, he became abusive, so Bethan then blocked him without thinking too much of it. Then Hancock then made another profile and found her. It carried on. Each time she blocked him he’d create another profile on separate social media channels and the cycle continued. It has since has taken over Bethan and her family’s lives. Despite Hancock ending up in prison for his crimes against Bethan and her mother Kathryn Sims he hasn’t stopped stalking them. “It’s been six years – six years of this nightmare,” Kathryn told WalesOnline this week after Hancock ended up back in prison for continuing to stalk the family. He is expected to be released next month. From the family home in Port Talbot, which Hancock is banned from approaching but continues to breach terms of the restraining order, Kathryn explained: “We are genuinely fearful for our lives. That’s what this has come to. “And honestly we don’t believe it is being taken anywhere near seriously enough. “We were just a normal family living a normal nice life. We never expected or wanted to be involved in this. I never thought I’d be in the press. But this is what it has pushed us to. It never leaves you when you have a stalker.” Hancock, who lived close to Bethan and Kathryn, soon tracked them down and began stalking them in person too. While he’s never actually spoken to the family in person he has sent messages on social media sometimes telling them where they were that day to prove to them that he’s watching them. On one occasion he told Bethan he knew she had children and he has also posted Kathryn and Bethan’s address online. The stalking became so bad Bethan felt she couldn’t leave her home and she had to have her children’s school on alert. In 2023, the family realised their stalker had previous for making other people’s lives a misery. Through a mutual friend they were put in contact with Carl Mallon, who had been stalked by Hancock for so long he had left his job and moved house. Carl said: “When I’m out my eyes are everywhere. It can wreck your life.” Hancock, previously of Lingfield Avenue in Port Talbot and now living in Neath, was sentenced to 48 weeks custody suspended for two years after pleading guilty to a charge of stalking involving fear of violence at Swansea Magistrates’ Court on November 13, 2023. He was tagged and received a five-year restraining order preventing him from contacting or approaching any of his victims in any way, but that hasn’t stopped him and Kathryn and Bethan are now returning to court next month to ask for a stricter restraining order. They also want a stalking prevention order placed on their case to give them more protection. Bethan explained: “We are still fighting for a stalking prevention order to be placed on Hancock because we feel he will be monitored more and it will be designed to him. “There is one completed and ready to be served but joint legal services have stopped it because they wanted to see what he did when he got out of jail the first time. “What he did when he got out of jail was break the exclusion zone around us, getting himself recalled back to prison. “Then he came out for a second time and broke the restraining order again. He is now back in prison for a third time. I think he’s proven he isn’t going to listen and that we are in danger.” Stalking prevention orders – or SPOs – were part of the Stalking Protection Bill brought forward by former Totnes Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Wollaston in 2018 and which came into force in January 2020. They are civil orders set up jointly by legal services including police and the probation service and they must be applied for by the police through the magistrates’ courts on behalf of victims. SPOs can prohibit activities such as entering certain locations or making contact and are designed to protect victims at the early stages of an investigation into alleged stalking. A BBC freedom of information request earlier this year revealed that from 2020 to 2023 just 1,439 SPOs had been issued by 40 forces in the UK despite their having been nearly 440,000 cases of stalking. Hancock first breached the current restraining order last year and ended up in prison for just short of 11 months. After being released after six months he breached the order again by contacting Bethan on social media on June 8. He was sentenced to 12 weeks custody and will be released in July. Kathryn said she does not believe enough is being done to protect them. “He broke the restraining order and was sent to prison and he came out halfway through that sentence and because he’s considered such a risk he was under robust MAPPA (multi-agency public protection arrangements) guidelines, essentially meaning everyone working together to keep us safe. But that isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. “Since then he has entered an exclusion zone which was previously in place to prevent him being anywhere near our home. He was very close to us. “We were told six days later that he’d entered the exclusion zone when we should have been notified very quickly. We could have been killed by the time we knew. “A few weeks ago Bethan received another message from him and he was arrested three days later. It shows he can’t switch off from her and he can’t not do these things. “I think he’s obsessed and fixated. It just shows how dangerous he is because don’t forget we’ve never actually spoken to him in person. He doesn’t even know us. It’s terrifying. “We’re back in court in Swansea on July 7 to request a far more robust restraining order where there is a permanent exclusion zone around us preventing him from coming within 200m of our home. “We need much more protection than we’ve got now if he’s going to be out of prison. We are so fed up. It’s affected everything. It makes you so unwell. I’ve been hospitalised with the stress of it because we’re in such danger from this man.” Inspector for South Wales Police Jared Easton, who is in charge of the case, said: “Neal Hancock is clearly a dangerous individual who refuses to learn his lesson and has caused all manner of trauma for his poor victim. “His behaviour towards this victim has been ongoing for several years now. “It is completely unacceptable, and nobody should have to put up with a prolonged campaign like this a further application is being made to the court to extend the conditions of the restraining order and should he fail to abide by these conditions, then he will be arrested and taken back to court.”