Hackers on Steroids (12 page)

As well as being jailed for writing demented sexual slurs about a number of dead children, including one baby, it was also widely reported on in the media that one of the offences he had ‘admitted to in his Internet troll letters’ was to trolling on a wall about the deceased reality TV personality Jade Goody. He had written on that wall to claim that he had sexually assaulted her children.

Satire, you see.

At the time when news of his arrest first reached me I had been worried that the letter-sending campaign wasn’t having the desired effect and so had been planning a worldwide simultaneous sending out of ‘packages’ in relation to 40 trolls in total. Trolls from America, the UK, Singapore, and Canada were all to be targeted in this way. We wanted to shock more of them out of RIP trolling by bringing it into their real lives and away from the safety of their little online fantasy land. I had found good and trustworthy people from all over the globe and the list of trolls who were certainly to be on the receiving end of it was then standing at 20, with others being looked at as potential candidates. This may make us sound like the real psychopaths to some but what ‘the packages’ were was a force of deep feeling being expressed at what is a true evil. We just wanted them to know that what they were doing wasn’t without consequence; we wanted them to feel the pain instead of their victims. It was felt by us that there was no other way to get any sort of justice at all, and checks, double checks, and triple checks were always done on an individual’s guilt before sending out anything about them. The whole thing wasn’t a nice business and it was indeed a potentially messy and dangerous business, but when law fails this kind of thing - and much worse - happens. For good or ill, it happens.

I believed at the time that the jailing of Coss was a game changer and it convinced me to abandon the letters campaign altogether. I rang up Coss’s local police station again after he was sent down to make it clear that I would take responsibility for the letters which were sent to his neighbours. Although there were also involved in the sending out of those letters other ‘behind the scenes’ people who have never revealed themselves to the trolls in any way and like to work quietly in the background, I had been the main instigator and if there was to be any trouble over it then it would only be fair that I take responsibility. The police appreciated me contacting them and, while they said they understood as to just why I had felt the need to take such out-of-the-ordinary steps, warned me never to do it again as it could possibly lead to police having a body on their hands should vigilante actions occur against the sickos in their neighbourhoods.

Which I accepted totally as a very fair point. This was always something that was in the back of my mind during my outing campaign against the RIP trolls, and it was something that I accepted might happen. Either that or the suicide of one of the outed trolls. I believe that I could live with the suicide of one of them quite easily in the sure knowledge that the troll was guilty of awful crimes - and harassing bereaved families is an awful crime - and that no actual human being had been harmed, but the thought of it all so inciting someone that they would take one of these creature’s lives and then have to spend possibly decades behind bars because of it was something that troubled me greatly. If I could have put all of those scum-things up against the wall then and without fear of the law shot them all I do believe that I could have done it without ever feeling any regret, but I’d hate to see an actual human being having his life destroyed over the sake of one of those entities. I did used to warn them that someone is going to end up killing one or more of them and that if it happened then the shit would really hit the fan as regards RIP trolling. I would have taken full advantage of it and used it to talk up the problem to a media that would have eaten it all up. I did used to ponder whether I would have been able to stop myself from trolling on Facebook about the dead troll. Something tells me that at any rate I would have laughed heartily at any trolling which did commence.

In the end though, it is they who are ultimately responsible for any hate or violence or other consequences that arise out of their evil, and at that time I felt as if the only thing worse than outing them would be not outing them. I never made up anything about them nor did I ever put words in their mouths, and all those who had those letters sent out about them were all as guilty as sin and have admitted as such themselves. The trolls protested greatly when I used to out them on walls or to their neighbours and mention the sexual slurs they like to make against named children. ‘But we’re not real paedophiles, we’re just trolls!’ they protested. That may be so but I certainly wouldn’t recommend any of you as babysitters. What is beyond dispute is that they gain immense pleasure from going around making paedophilic remarks about children both living and dead. Anyone who does that has some cheek complaining then about being labelled as a paedophile. With ropes wove from their own words shall they be hung.

One of their number who is without doubt a real paedophile is one who has most usually went under the handle of ‘Frankie Desmond.’ Celebrated by his fellow cultural critics as one of the most depraved - and therefore adored - of all trolls, ‘Frankie’ is known to be from Dublin and was one of the few trolls I have ever witnessed being ‘daring’ enough to post actual child sex abuse images onto Facebook. A message he once sent to an anti-troll, who he thought a real troll, shows the disturbing workings of his mind:

its no big deal, i say satanism but its just a sic passion for sexual depravity, i constantly fantasise about a satanic orgy of pure lust men and women fucking and sucking while a child is tied up in front of its parents and raped and tortured, mind control like as well as the torture and humiliation of the helpless parents making them do stuff in order to save their child only to fuck with their heads eventually let pit bulls savage them one by one.

See how fuckin sic i am, am i alone i
  wonder if only i could find likeminded. You must wonder wtf is he?

I reported him in person to An Garda Síochána, the Irish police, and although I had at that stage grown used to all this sort of stuff, I could see how shocked the policeman who took my evidence was at the whole tale. I don’t believe that ‘Frankie’ has ever been caught.

There is also a fondness among some of these entities for private messaging children with pornographic pictures or with lewd sexual suggestions, the screencaps of which they will then display for the delight of their fellow non-human creatures. Corrupting innocence is seen as something to aim for (Rule 15 of the unofficial ‘rules’ of 4Chan’s /b/ board states that: ‘The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it’) and there have been instances that I have witnessed when they have openly organised themselves on Facebook to flood children’s websites with hardcore pornography of both the straight and gay varieties, along with bestiality and necrophilia photographs and images of people who have died violently, including people murdered in the Holocaust. I have seen some of the necrophilia photographs they delight in sharing out about among themselves. At least one of the bodies being defiled is that of a child.

One troll, who calls himself ‘Mitchell Henderson’ after the young suicide victim and who IP’s to Indiana State University at Bloomington, for instance organised in 2010 a number of pornography raids on various children’s websites. For each raid the trolls were to all go to a certain children’s Web forum or wiki at the same time and flood them with those kinds of pornographic and violent images. One of the sites, the troll announced, was intended for 8 to 12-year-old children. A now well-known British female troll posted ‘Can’t wait’ in relation to that raid.

Said that troll who calls himself ‘Mitchell Henderson’ of one attack he was organising on a children’s website for August 3rd 2010:

Ok 2 hours to go, so I figured I’d make a list of some things to do during the raid.

Lure the kids into viewing shock content

Posting anything gererally
[sic]
offensive

Attacking idividual
[sic]
users

Get a thread going on /b/

Remember these are young inoccent
[sic]
minds, so be as sick and twisted as possible. Also do your best not to attract mods, however I think there are very few.

Later on he sent this message out to the trolls who were going to be taking part in this raid along with him:

10 minutes till raid time, if you haven’t made an account go ahead and do so and lets get ready. Remember to be as sick and twisted as humanly possible, we want to scar these kids for life.

The psychotics who do these things will often claim that they are ‘just trolling’ and that their personas are for the Internet only. When confronted they will repeatedly deny that they are
really
sickos and will claim that they are merely ‘playing’ at being depraved. It should go without saying though that you don’t ‘pretend’ to be a perverted child abuser by gaining pleasure from showing eight-year-old children pornography. And you don’t ‘pretend’ to be evil by tormenting the parents of a dead child. If you do those things you are a perverted child abuser and you are evil - there’s no pretending about it. If these trolls don’t do the same things offline it’s because they know they’d easily get their skulls smashed in for it if they did, and not by pretend hammers either. ‘We only do it for the lulz,’ is an often trotted out excuse for their behaviour. Yes, the ‘lulz’ that you get from showing children dead bodies being sexually violated. As if that’s meant to make it all understandable.

A country that was not on the list for that great unrealised letters blitz and which contains a number of trolls whose dox I am in possession of is Australia, for the reason being that it had, for a short period at least in 2010, been in the forefront worldwide in tackling memorial page trolling. In the June and July of that year two Australian trolls were arrested and charged in relation to their criminal activities on memorial pages, and both of them were part of that main Facebook trolling ring. By far the most infamous of them is Bradley Hampson, a then 29-year-old who trolled under the name ‘Dale Angerer,’ an identity stolen from an old Bundaberg schoolmate of his on whom Hampson reportedly wanted revenge. The second is Jessica Cook, then aged 22 and a revolting beastie of a thing who when she got to court pathetically claimed that bullying in her childhood made her do it.

When 4Chan fanatic Hampson was around he was the god among trolls and so naturally he was also the biggest target for troll-hunters such as myself. Even the police in Australia had publicly declared that they were hunting for him and it was obvious to all except him and his chronically deluded fan base that he was going to fall and fall hard sooner or later. ‘Dale Angerer’ became possibly the most infamous RIP troll on the Web at that time, and the real Dale Angerer was having to deal with it in the form of death threats about him personally from people who were convinced that it was he who was actually doing the trolling. There was even a Facebook page set up with the aim of gathering enough information with which to track him down and I witnessed people on it discussing about how they should travel to his city in order to attack him. Maybe just bluster, but the hate was real enough. As with the real Olivia Rooney, the pitchforks had come out for Dale Angerer.

The troll Dale had gained notoriety for the amount of photoshopped images he had made featuring faces of deceased children superimposed into pornographic scenes, which he haunted Facebook day and night placing on memorial pages dedicated to them. Two attacks in particular by him of this nature on pages set up in memory of two Queensland children had created national headlines and outrage in Australia. The pages had been trolled heavily by dozens of other trolls also (an infestation that once again came from 4Chan), but it was Hampson’s posting of his home-made child pornography that really shocked Australians. For this outrage earned, ‘Dale’ sat atop of the dung heap and was treated with adulation by the rest of this subhuman collective.

But the bigger they are the harder they fall and it was the police who in June 2010 eventually tracked him down to a shared house in Brisbane, seizing his computer and other materials and arresting him. He was refused bail by a court for his own protection and the highly-publicised news of his capture and the seriousness with which his offences were being dealt with lit a fire of ecstasy in the souls of us anti-trolls. He was, at least as far as I and others are aware, the first individual in the world to be taken up to court to answer charges relating to memorial page trolling. Things had just gotten real for the trolls and they went about in a daze.

I made an ‘RIP Bradley Paul Hampson’ page on which we all could publicly celebrate this wonderful news and we partied on it for days before reportage by the very emotional and hurting trolls caused Facebook to delete it. Tower Cat, an old-style troll who despises the RIP variety of troll and who instead trolls the trolls, made for it what is still one of my favourite ’shoops - ‘Dale’ having to explain to the murderous looking criminals inside prison that ‘Trolling is an art.’