Hackers on Steroids

by Oisín Sweeney

  Now, at that time the Dmitri Shostakovich troll was something of a Dark Lord of the Internet, hugely respected by his fellow trolls for the amount of hatred and outrage his daily and constant RIP trolling was generating, and especially for the media coverage that some of it had received in Australia. Dmitri was a bit of a hero to the trolls, someone many of these ultimately tragic little creatures held in awe and sought to emulate. There is always a hierarchy in any one grouping and Dmitri was way at the top of this one. Though like the muttering social wreck that is Sean Duffy, and the geeky, permanently confused-looking CS, Hunter Mello disappointed dreadfully in the real life supervillian stakes, being less the Dark Lord Sauron and more McLovin’s even more nerdish younger brother. Of all the trolls I know of who have hidden behind Internet personas to project terrifying images of themselves onto the vulnerable people on whom they prey, Mello, with the curtain whipped away to reveal his real identity, has to be the most laughable. And that, by god, is really saying something.

  This serial memorial page desecrater - who once boasted of having trolled non-stop for over 24 hours straight - stood before me as it were as the very meaning of nerd. Even considering the trauma he had caused others I couldn’t help but wonder then just what the hell I was doing chasing these types up. In his early 20s, glasses, braces, foppish hair, and with a giant frown on him in every single picture; the photographs of his bedroom showing walls covered in posters of computer game sprites and Japanese robot characters. One photograph has him wearing a cape, another is of him dressed up as Neo out of the Matrix films. Clearly in real life Hunter Mello was a danger only to himself, being the type who would earn himself a booting from street thugs by going to the shops dressed as C3PO. But it has to be said, as ridiculous and comical as that part of him is, his nerdy exterior hides a seriously psychotic interior which the Web has allowed him to project out of himself and run rampant with, and nothing to my mind exemplifies the strange nature of the Internet beast more than as to how this absurd little being has helped bring such real pain and distress to probably hundreds of people.

  Then calling myself ‘Nem E Sis,’ his subsequent outing by me caused an embarrassing spectacle from hundreds of trolls and groupies who spent days and days afterwards spitting rage at me for posting up his name, address, and photograph beside screencaps of the grotesque remarks he was making about dead children on RIP pages and then linking to all of this on any Facebook group I could find containing the name of his home town of Alvin, Texas. ‘He wanted attention and now I am helping him get it. You should all be thanking me so what’s the problem?’ I asked them.

  The trolls like to take satisfaction in asking ‘U mad, bro?’ after they’ve angered someone. I certainly could have asked ‘You mad, trolls?’ there and on many subsequent occasions since when they have become apoplectic at having troll dox put around. I still can’t to this day get over how precious they are about themselves and others in their own number. They see themselves as being an untouchable elite and anything that goes against that challenges their thinking patterns so much that many of them will take severe mental breakdowns when it occurs. It is as if they believe the people of the world to be their playthings and therefore they should be allowed to do what they will with them and expect no comeback from it. They just can’t quite grasp that the world is allowed to shoot back in this dirty little war which they have started with it. This is something else that points toward psychopathy.

  It can be seen how ‘Paulie’ drones on mechanically as to the workings of RIP trolling like it is some sort of cold, scientific experiment. There is a great distance between the cockroach-like consciousnesses of these characters and how things really are. Indeed, after my exposing of their hero these trolls quickly began to see me as the biggest bully who has ever lived, especially after Hunter Mello reported to them that I had mailed his parents some examples of his trolling which I had printed out - along with the advice to get him some immediate psychiatric help. This led to the trolls all rallying around their by now deeply wounded hero, promising him that it would all be all right and that they’d get me for him. While these trolls normally show no sympathy for anyone no matter what their plight, they do in general display a great concern for their fellow trolls whenever trouble comes their way because of their online activities. This can easily be explained by their gang mentality of having to cover the backs of the rest of them so that they too will have your back, and shouldn’t be seen as them displaying any real empathy. A ‘brotherhood of the trolls’ sort of thing.

  The level of concern generated for the poor little man, as well as entertaining me no end, worked out quite well as it led to me being able to soon dox several other at the time very prominent and horribly cancerous trolls, two of whom had joined Mello’s real-life profile with their own real-life profiles in turn as an act of solidarity. I had at the time created a persona by the name of ‘Trollin Stone’ (sporting a Mick Jagger profile picture) and, without doing any trolling at all I might add, had gathered up around 300 trolls and groupies onto my friend list. The only thing I did to get myself in with them was talk about how much I hated me. On Facebook, when you have a friend request accepted or forwarded to you, or when someone sends you a message or posts under a comment that you have made, the email account linked to your profile receives a message informing you of this and at that time you were able to get the IP address of the person from that email message. An IP address is a unique code assigned to every computer that is connected to the Web and the Net is full of free software programs which give a rough geographical location for every IP address number entered into them.

  Having witnessed these two trolls discussing on one of their ‘secret’ groups (that is, groups on Facebook unviewable to anyone except to those invited into them by people on their friend lists) about how they had shown their trust to Mello, I was then able to dox the both of them, simply by checking Mello’s profile for two new friends - one from Singapore and the other from Toronto, the two places I had IP-ed the respective trolls to. The Singaporean is a total and absolute psychotic with serious daddy issues who trolled under the name ‘Launch,’ and whose real first name is Thierry. The Canadian was the then favourite troll sweetheart, who trolled as ‘Sarah Lake’ and who is a woman in her early 20s.

  Fooling them then into messaging me from their real profiles, and having crosschecked the IP addresses I got from those email notifications, I then outed their real identities as well, using again my ‘Nem E Sis’ handle. This led to a bit of a troll panic as rumours spread that some genius level hacker was on the scene ‘doxing like a boss’ in the words of one troll.

  It’s not that I’m a genius of the dox, son - it’s just that most of you all are stupid.

  Quite amusingly, on the same night that I outed those trolls I was invited, through my ‘undercover’ Trollin Stone alt, onto another secret troll wall on which a couple of dozen members of this ludicrous band of gonads were discussing as to how they could best keep their identities safe from the terrible Nem E Sis. Even more amusingly, one of them, a relatively big name in trolling even then but now something of a celebrity because of his trolling activities, posted a link to his real-name Facebook account and asked his fellow trolls as to advice on keeping it as locked down from public view as possible and away from the prying eyes of myself. This troll was calling himself ‘Nimrod Severn’ but his genuine account had him as a Darren Burton from Cardiff, Wales, and this idiotic little slip of his was to lead two years later to me and the BBC making him infamous as he grunted at millions like a pig-thing from the open door of a bus.

  I had become a genuine hate figure by now for the cultural critics and their rabid desire to learn my real identity led to a strange and disturbing episode where I was for a while wrongly thought to be a middle-aged man from England named Oliver Jackson. This episode saw perhaps up to 100 trolls take part in a concerted campaign to ruin this Oliver’s name and that involved them making Facebook groups filled with his dox and whic
h falsely labelled him as a paedophile. They also trolled RIP pages and then with other profiles posted his dox on them along with the claims that he was responsible.

  When I got to learn of this I was horrified. I never for one minute had contemplated that someone innocent would have gotten the blame for my outing activities and so I first got speaking to Oliver Jackson himself and then subsequently got in contact with some of the trolls and agreed with them that if they would stop their campaign of harassment against this Oliver then I would cease posting their dox around and leave Facebook. This was roughly agreed to across the board by the great majority in that troll ring and so I disabled my Nem E Sis and Mike Lonston Facebook profiles and left immediately. However, it soon transpired that Oliver Jackson had, for reasons known only to himself, betrayed my Trollin Stone profile to the trolls and advised them to take it off their friend lists. ‘Anything for the cause,’ he said to them.

  I had by then fallen in with some others who were working against the RIP trolls and when Jackson’s actions were brought to my attention by one of them on the voice communication application Skype, my good graces toward this Oliver character immediately left me and I returned back to the scene. My thoughts were that Oliver Jackson could handle his new friends by himself. Maybe this was wrong of me and I should have been more understanding considering what he had just been through, but I wasn’t and there you go and here we are. What I did do was let the trolls hear my voice so that they would know that I was Irish and most definitely not Oliver Jackson. Perhaps even that was too generous of me considering, but I was fearful that someone, troll or otherwise, would physically attack him because of all of this. I do know that if he hadn’t gone and done what he done then I would certainly have stayed away permanently and subsequent events, including this book, would never have occurred.

  When this Oliver had been fail-doxed as me the trolls were boasting that ‘Anonymous’ had tracked me down. Anonymous in this case subsequently turned out to be a bald, big-nosed, psychotic fantasist from Liverpool whom we shall call Paul Baloney, and who it later transpired had most likely blamed Oliver Jackson as being me in an act of revenge against him after an online argument over some girl from Scotland. In his early 30s, he lives with his mother and spends his entire life trolling from his bedroom yet tells people online that he is a millionaire filmmaker as well as being an undefeated street-fighting champion with extensive underworld contacts.

  Baloney has reached terrifying levels of Internet psychosis. Trolling is his very existence, his very reason for staying alive; and his entire being is tied up in his online fantasy world. He’s fully prepared to risk going to jail, by god I even believe him fully prepared to risk himself being murdered, just to keep his Internet persona alive. I observed him once, in the January of 2012, trolling for over 30 hours straight. He had begun trolling on a particular Facebook group at 2pm in the day and when I looked back into that same group that night at around 12 o‘clock - a group set up specifically so people could have a go at each other on it - he was still howling away. Howling and howling and howling about things comprehensible only to himself as well as posting random screencaps that he has taken over the years of unremarkable online conversations and which he keeps posting everywhere because they ‘prove’ some things that are earth-shattering, although just what no-one sane seems to know. I could see that he clearly had been doing this non-stop all day.

  Non-stop.

  When I awoke the next morning and checked Facebook I was greatly amused to see that he was still at it and had been so all night. All. Fucking. Night. And still it carried on - without a break, nonsense post after nonsense post - UNTIL AFTER 8PM THAT NIGHT. When challenged on the length of this single trolling session he bizarrely claimed that it was ‘part of his job’ and that he was ‘getting well paid for it.’ Three days after Christmas 2010 I looked onto Facebook and saw that he had spent Christmas evening trolling fat people. Santa wept and I got inspired to write a takeoff of the classic Mud festive song ‘Lonely This Christmas’:

  It’ll be Baloney this Christmas

  Without real life friends around

  It’ll be Baloney this Christmas

  Baloney and cold

  It’ll be cold, so cold

  But at least he’ll have trolled

  This Christmas

  Paul Baloney is a leader of trolls. On Facebook, on where he most usually uses the name ‘Tylor Durden’ but goes by many other aliases too (the most common of those being ‘Honesto Cop’ and ‘Frankie Bags’), he runs his own indescribably sad little trolling crew named ‘Teh Council,’ over whom he rules with a rod of iron. Most of them are much younger than him - being aged from around 12 to their late teens - and so he comes across as something of an Internet Charles Manson: an older, infinitely creepy, and supremely psychotic horror show who has gathered under his wing the lost children of the night, all of whom are both braindead and disturbed enough to do his nefarious bidding for him. According to an ex-girlfriend of his, and who herself trolled at one stage, he also has a severe hygiene problem, refusing to wash and to change his socks for days and days on end, which makes me think that he must also smell how I imagine Charlie Manson to smell too. Paul Baloney is like something that will be found at some stage in the near future lowering a basket into a well while chanting repeatedly that: ‘It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,’ and all while dressed in a suit of the finest human skin.

  His troll ex-girlfriend told a story about waking up one morning to find Paul Baloney’s hands around her throat and a look of purest hate upon his horrible, horrible face. ‘Sorry,’ said Paul when he let go of her after she began to struggle. ‘You reminded me of my mother there. I hate that whore.’

  His crew is, as you would imagine, made up mostly of males but sometimes a female or two pops into it for a time, only to be driven off again by the collective when inevitably she incurs Baloney’s wrath by beginning to get too close to any one single member of the goon squad. Baloney doesn’t tolerate the idea of ‘hoes before bros’ in his gang, feeling that his power becomes eroded whenever a female begins to exert too much influence over one of his winged monkeys. One hilarious example of when a female entered their trolling pit and caused great ructions within it occurred close to the Christmas period in 2011. The woman, a Scottish troll in her early or mid-20s and who trolls under the pseudonym ‘Iona’ but whose real first name is Michelle, captured the heart of one of Baloney’s top lieutenants, a Texan troll who goes under the pseudonyms ‘Peter Partyvan’ and ‘Peter Vance.’ ‘Peter’ was one of the older members of the Baloney crew, being in his 20s. A severely, utterly deranged individual who is notorious even among the trolls themselves for his multiple mental disorders and rampant paranoia, Peter Paranoid as he is known to some of us pretended to be a medical doctor but was doxed by some of the other trolls as working in a call centre.

  The blossoming love between this gruesome twosome so worried Baloney that he gave the order for Iona to sleep with one of his other lieutenants instead so as to drive a wedge between her and his beloved Peter, whose attentions he demanded all for himself.

  Yes, that right - he actually ordered this Iona creature to sleep with one of his trolls. The troll in question, a friendless 19-year-old part German/part American by the name of Josh and who suffers from what looks like Elephantitis of the face, was coming over to Britain that Christmas to hang out with Baloney and some other trolls, including the then soon-to-be-infamous Damon Evans from Wales, another of Baloney’s winged monkeys. This Josh character makes frequent trips around the world to visit trolls he has met online, which isn’t surprising really as he is known to be a very lonely boy in real life. Perhaps regular people don’t like hanging out with sociopathic morons who drool all over themselves at news of people dying in car accidents. Who’d have thought it, eh?

  Anyway, Baloney had issued the order for Iona to take this Josh creature into her house for a time over the Christmas period for the purpos
e of having sex with him. Josh was all for it, in fact was salivating at the very thought. Because that’s what normal people do, isn’t it - jet over the world to spend Christmas Day in the company of people whom they have never met before. And then demand of them that they fuck you. The image of an official troll order being issued that commanded one troll to copulate with another is something which I will never be able to get out of my poor head, much as I may desperately wish to.

  Iona, her little heart filled with love for Peter, bravely refused her master’s order and instead she and Peter declared their undying devotion to each other, proving that love is indeed stronger than fear. Brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it? A real Mills and Goon romance, eyes meeting over a trolled Facebook page.

  For Baloney, this resistance to his edict was tantamount to treason and he and the rest of his still-loyal cultural critics spent weeks openly feuding with Iona and Peter in what was a very amusing spectacle that saw both sides spilling all the dirt and the embarrassing secrets which they held on the other side. ‘Peter Vance, you’re dead to me,’ is how Baloney publicly declared their relationship over in an emotionally-charged posting spree outlining his feelings of betrayal and making clear to Peter and Iona that they should be scared. Very scared indeed. Because Baloney had issued a new decree banning them from appearing anywhere on the entire Internet any longer. ‘Don't make me prove to you that I haven't even tried,’ said the 32-year-old lets-pretend don of the cyber-underworld on forcing the loved-up couple to retreat from the Web. ‘In fact, please say it again and watch what happens.’