Hackers on Steroids (30 page)

Mild-mannered Damon, who comes from a tiny Welsh village, likes to post up on the Web pictures of himself striking gangsta poses while holding what are presumably imitation guns. He’s like a member of the spoof Welsh rap band Goldie Lookin Chain, but without the intended irony.

Shit is so white trash.

But as anyone who has seen
The Anti-Social Network
will know, Damon Evans was straight-out lying about not being an RIP troll. Before his interview I had provided the producers with screencaps of Evans RIP trolling in a few of his guises, and as himself; along with admissions he had made to me of his guilt. He really had no clue of what he was walking into.

When confronted by Richard Bacon during the interview with some of the screencaps that I had supplied of his extremely vile RIP trolling, Damon didn’t miss a beat in denying that he had actually done the trolling, claiming instead that he had been ‘cloned’ by someone else (the stock excuse used by all of them whenever the heat is on. If ever I get the one bad troll who is cloning all of these good trolls I shall take in my hand a sword of the finest steel and cut lumps out of him). But I had got Evans to admit his RIP trolling to me just before he went for the interview, including which pseudonyms he had used, and Richard brought out that evidence (Damon helpfully seemed to miss the fact that I had supplied that evidence, something which later proved to be a stroke of luck). During those moments you can see the dreams Damon Evans had for his comedy career dying in his scared little eyes and his ever-greying face. Still, though, he denied ‘100%’ being an RIP troll, before slinking out the door utterly defeated and home to Wales to lick his wounds. When the producers told me of his flat-out denials made all throughout the interview I decided to test my luck with him one last time, because, and I think this may be clear by now, poor ole Damon is hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer. So I rang him up and asked him about how the interview had went. Incredibly, or not so incredibly I suppose, he still hadn’t cottoned onto the fact that I had anything to do with it all and so he admitted to me on the phone that he had lied to Richard Bacon about his RIP trolling, helpfully even going through a short list of some of the people he had done such about. I sent the recording of this phone call on to the producers who then emailed Damon about it, receiving back an email from him finally admitting his very obvious guilt (although trying to blame it on the ‘grief tourists’) and promising that he had now mended his ways.

I almost felt sorry for Damon in all of that. Almost.

I just had to turn my lovely wee Irish charm on and pretend to make ‘friends’ with Damon and a number of other trolls and get them to do over-the-phone or Skype talks with me at that time, which I said were ‘interviews’ for a book I was writing about trolls, an idea I came up with when the BBC asked me if I had any evidence which could implicate any of the RIP trolls (I just want to stress that I done these ‘interviews’ off my own bat, and was not put up to them by the BBC). Yes, trolls, go and confess everything on tape to someone who is trying to ruin your lives - ah sure what could go wrong with that?

Many of these needy little creatures jumped at the chance to be part of a book, even when the person who was writing it was someone who had expressed a fervent wish to boil alive all of them for the purposes of making glue out of their horrible little selves. In the immortal words of Homer, Doh! Another reminder I was given of how ridiculously narcissistic many of these trolls are was when I made the announcement that I was writing a book on trolling and was looking some trolls for ‘interviews’ for it, a few members of the species whom I hadn’t even noticed before were proudly exclaiming that at least half of the book would be devoted to any one of them, such was the importance each of them attached to their own trolling. ‘Who exactly are you and what horse did you ride in on?’ I had to ask of a few of them who begged me to do ‘interviews’ with them. At least one of them was terribly wounded that I hadn’t even noticed him before, as he seemed to think that he was the number one target of all anti-trolls.

‘You ALL fucking ARE after me Lonston! I KNOW that I keep you all awake at night!!’ he exclaimed.

Aye, mate. Aye you do.

But the only ‘interviews’ I was seeking were of trolls that I knew the real identities of. Sad, silly Colm Coss was another who was all too willing to spill everything to me on the phone, and the producers of
The Anti-Social Network
were delighted to receive a recording of this as Coss began RIP trolling again almost as soon as he got out of jail and they wanted to confront him about it. He wasn’t trolling at near the intensity that he was before his prison sentence, but he was still doing it and that was all that mattered. The producers had that recording of him admitting his post-prison RIP trolling to me on the phone, and sent him a letter informing him of this and asking for a face-to-face television interview with him to discuss as to why he was still haunting RIP pages. Colm wouldn’t play ball, but armed with such damning evidence of his guilt the makers of the program were able to satisfy the strict BBC guidelines for door-stepping members of the public and after waiting patiently for the hermit-like Coss to appear in public, they finally cornered him coming out of an Internet café.

Coss, dressed in a red coat and wearing a woolly hat and in the words of one Internet commentator looking more like a garden gnome than a troll, was initially clearly not far from bursting into tears as Richard Bacon fired off a barrage of questions at him about some of the trolling he had been doing after being released from prison. ‘I really don’t wish to be interrogated by you or anyone,’ pleaded the meek little garden gnome troll, before cycling away on his bicycle. Later in the day the serial RIP troll would come onto Facebook using a fake profile he had made of Richard Bacon to complain of being ‘harassed.’ Irony has no place at all in the minds of these trolls.

The program was a triumph, and as well as showing what really was hiding behind the masks of RIP trolls it carried a very moving interview with the family of Tom Mullaney. If you can watch that and still think that attacking RIP pages is funny then you are not fit to live among human beings.

The other BBC program being made at the same time about the issue of RIP trolling and other forms of cyberbullying was an episode of Panorama, the primetime BBC documentary series. The episode was titled
Hunting the Internet Bullies
and for this one I handed over two separate hour-long ‘interviews’ that I had done with Darren ‘Nimrod Severn’ Burton and in which he talked candidly about being a long-term RIP troll. The BBC sent him an email then informing him that they had evidence of his trolling and asking him to appear on their documentary program. Like Damon, dunce Darren didn’t put two and two together and messaged me on Facebook to actually seek out my advice on whether to do the interview or not, helpfully putting himself even further in the crapper by some of the things he said, all of which I was passing straight on to the BBC producers.

In the end, Burton refused to appear on the program but like Coss the evidence against him was overwhelming, and so the BBC sent their crew along to confront him in his home area of Cardiff. Burton messaged me right after that confrontation, telling me that he knew I had given him to the BBC (at last!) and letting me know of his disappointment that I had done so (while promising that the ‘angry’ police were going to put a stop to the BBC’s plans to broadcast the program, he then launched into a bizarre rant about how he isn’t gay and won’t ever be forced to into marriage with another man).

Poor, dumb, bastard. On the Internet I believe they call what I done to Burton ‘trolling someone.’

I had got the impression that Burton had made quite a show of himself when confronted with a camera crew, and if Alfred Hitchcock had at that time risen from the dead and made a film starring the also resurrected Elvis, Cleopatra, and Saddam Hussein, I could not have been looking more forward to seeing it than I was to seeing this.

But before Burton’s star appearance on the doxumentary appeared one Malcolm Blackman, on to act as something of a spokesman for trolls; a Guy Fawkes mask sitting on the table beside him and an ‘Anonymous UK’ jumper pulled on over his funny little self (once again showing his complete misunderstanding of the word ‘anonymous’). Malcolm boasted in the interview of spending time in the online company of some ‘notorious’ trolls, who, he said, gained a ‘modicum’ of respect for him, and who in turn then gained his respect.

A modicum of respect is indeed all that those trolls do have for Mad Mal, and even that modicum may be smaller in portion than he believes it to be. After the destruction of his beloved HATO his newfound friends trolled him hard into believing that I was actually that Oliver Jackson fella whom the psychopath Paul Baloney had tried to set up as being me. They actually made Malfunction believe that I pay an Irishman to speak on Skype for me. They actually made him believe that. Malcolm was so taken in by all of this trolling, seeming to forget that trolls actually, er, troll, that he announced on Facebook that he had went to the police and made a complaint against Jackson for destroying his Facebook page.

‘Excuse me, Mr Officer, but someone just destroyed my Facebook page, and along with that some trolls on the Internet have told me who it was. Go arrest him now.’

(I’d just like to take the opportunity here to remind readers as of Mr Blackman’s age: It’s 45)

How the trolls must have been wetting themselves at him. Malfunction is in the unique position of being a joke to both trolls and anti-trolls.

Schizophrenic Malcolm claimed to the BBC that he is out to work against the same trolls he respects. However, he has made some admissions that he was actually approached by the RIP trolls to act as their spokesman on that same program. This shouldn’t be taken as a sign of how much they respect him, it’s just them knowing that he would be stupid enough to go on TV and speak up for Internet trolls (although in the end the BBC didn’t broadcast much of what he said). Even Darren Burton wasn’t stupid enough to agree to do that.

This is what Malcolm wrote on his own Youtube channel on August 31
st
2012:

Panorama did a documentary on Anonymity on the net, internet bullies, and the consequences. So where exactly do we draw the line. Credit goes to Tylor Durden, Mallory Knox, Harry Sacks, Derrick Smith, Prince Vegeta Saiyan, Buck Transience, Andy McNob and all the other Corporation VIP’s without whom we would never have had the answers to give to Panorama in the first place.

I’ve never heard of Andy McNob but certainly all of the rest of them are RIP trolls. The favourite trick of ‘Prince Vegeta Saiyan’ is to photoshop pictures of dead children into porno scenes.

Here’s some RIP trolling that may annoy you a bit more than theirs does, Mal: LOL HATO’s dead.

During my talks with Darren Burton he had tried to put himself across as a decent, regular fella who just has a dark sense of humour that some seem to misunderstand. He seemed to be seeking my sympathy and certainly my understanding, telling me that RIP trolls are just working out their pain through what he sees as nothing more than comedy acts. He talked to me about having ‘new material’ that he wanted to try out, and slagged off the troll ‘Bomford’ for always using the same ‘I fucked her rotten corpse’ line on RIP pages, which Burton seemed to think was originally the height of wit but that he now thought had grown stale with overuse. Even the wittiest of zingers gets old if used too often, eh, Darren?

The only material I have ever observed Darren Burton use is of a similar standard of wit to ‘Bomford’s.’ Believe me, what was shown on Panorama was nowhere near to being the worst of Burton’s trolling. ‘Rot in piss you filthy nigger,’ was just Darren Burton’s comedy act getting warmed up.

Burton’s ‘decent fella’ guise was soon dropped altogether after a BBC TV crew captured him like some wild beast in a trap, and after being subjected to some prodding questioning on the street from presenter Declan Lawn, the grunting man-pig abomination that is the real Darren Burton rose up in anger. ‘Have you ever thought about the people you are hurting?’ asked Declan Lawn of him.

‘Fuck ‘um!’ grunted back the man-pig as he got onto a bus, before going into a furious tirade about being able to say what he wanted to anyone on Facebook.

Alongside Burton getting onto that bus, although her face was pixelated out on television, was his girlfriend Kirsty Chapman, a mother of three in her mid-30s and who met Burton through their shared love of trolling RIP pages with demented and witless sexual slurs about the deceased. Chapman also spoke to me during my Skype ‘interviews’ with Burton, saying enough during them to out herself as the RIP troll ‘Percy Aww-ffs.’ A few months after the Panorama episode aired I sent the recordings of our conversations, along with some screencap evidence that two ladies had collected, on to the Daily Mail, and they sent along a reporter to confront ‘Percy,’ doing a two page exposé on her and Burton then in a Saturday edition of their paper. Burton gave the Mail some further insight into the disassociation he has in his mind with his ‘comedy act,’ saying: ‘It’s not really me saying those things anyway, it’s another person I become when I go online as Nimrod Severn or whatever name I assume.’