Exactly! People are not trained in gathering and interpreting evidence. And when they are “investigating” something that is personally affecting them there is probably even greater chance of them jumping to conclusions and acting rashly. Emotions will cloud judgement. And judgement was lacking in the first place because they are not trained in how to investigate matters and they are not familiar with tactics that criminals use to make it appear like they are someone else.
Several years ago when I still had a Facebook account there was a guy that DMed me yelling at me and accusing me of trying to “hack him”. His evidence? The reverse DNS record for a server was pointing to a domain I owned. I replied and told him the reverse record was out of date. I had previously rented a VPS with that IP address and I had had the reverse record point to my domain. I had since cancelled the rental of that VPS and now the hosting company had assigned the IP to someone else. Apparently the hosting company had not bothered to remove the reverse DNS record from their systems so it was still pointing to my domain. The guy that was yelling at me was of course too stupid to understand this when I explained it to him so I gave up on trying to educate him and blocked him from being able to send me any more DMs.
Now imagine if this guy had started a full-on retaliation campaign based on his misguided “evidence”. Luckily for me I never heard or seen from him again.
But yeah, that kind of thing is exactly why “vigilante justice” is such an incredibly dangerous and stupid idea.