Hackers on Steroids

by Oisín Sweeney

  Truth be told, if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look in a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. But in engaging in any agreement with a featherweight bully like this you weaken all of us.

  In closing, I’m not interested in compromise with faggots like Lonston. I’m also not willing to cede anything because people haven’t learned to protect themselves (and I hope you all have by now). Nothing changes due to your appeasement efforts unless it is a new understanding that attacking bystanders like Oliver Jackson will only help shut down self-proclaimed ‘hunters’

  Under this he had posted the Anonymous symbol of a headless man in a black suit and surrounded by the group’s logo. Just to really hammer home that he meant business, you see. He and some of the other little pretend mobsters then went on to confer at length in the most serious and matter-of-fact terms about ‘terror campaigns’ against anti-trolls, and indulged themselves by referring to ‘negotiations’ and ‘appropriate measures.’

  Thus what we are up against: severely mentally disordered space cadets who have indulged themselves so deeply in a delusion of mafia that they really do begin in themselves to believe that they truly are ‘kind of like the Mafia’ (but only less forgiving, let us not forget) and so start to act kind of like the Mob too in the belief that their tactics of fear and intimidation will have no consequences for them.

  But for many innocent people their psychotic fantasy games certainly do have consequences that they bring with them from the computer and into their lives. The delusional psychopaths that are these trolls force the most vulnerable and innocent people imaginable to become part of their insane online game world, for they do see it all as a game world and the people whom they haunt and torture as things put there only for their enjoyment. So I and some of the other anti-trolls decided to turn the tables on them and bring it all back into their real worlds and so was born the idea of what came to be known as ‘the packages.’

  This was something that I came up with when I talked to the trolls about leaving them alone if they left old Oliver alone (and, yes, I know that the image of troll/anti-troll peace negotiations is completely ludicrous and like something which the satirist Chris Morris would come up with, as well as I am fully aware that being a ‘troll-hunter’ is a lot less cool than it sounds, but when you decide to jump down into the rabbit hole you sometimes have to play by the Mad Hatter’s rules). When at first they weren’t willing to back down I thought up of something that I believed would make them think again: any trolls whose real identities were known were going to have large envelopes filled with screencaps of the very sickest examples of their paedophilic RIP trolling sent out to their families, to their work or college, and to 20 of their neighbours. This so scared some of them that they begged the rest of the trolls into agreeing to leave Oliver Jackson alone. Well, most of the trolls agreed but - even apart from the absurd Paulie Socash - one in particular, then an extremely active and particularly unfunny RIP troll who went by the names of ‘SirAlex Ferguson’ and ‘Carl Johnston,’ was acting as Paul Baloney’s voice on the matter and so was totally against the idea. Baloney had trolled this drooling cretin into believing that this Oliver fellow was absolutely and without doubt indeed me, and ‘SirAlex’ wanted his blood.

  ‘I will be personally delighted upon your murder,’ he had said to me, thinking that I was Oliver.

  This all worked out fine though as when I returned and told the trolls that ‘the packages’ were going to begin I erroneously blamed it on SirAlex, who at Baloney’s behest had continued to place Oliver’s dox on trolled RIP walls. This led quickly to the hoped-for outcome with me being given SirAlex’s real dox by a few of the trolls, and after thoroughly checking out that the dox was legit he became the first troll casualty of the packages which he had helped so much to inspire.

  Lulz, as they might say on 4Chan.

  Yes, this was outright vigilantism, but all I will say is that these ‘packages’ only happened because of a total failure of the real authorities to deal with this. When these envelopes began to fall onto door mats it had been over 12 months since I had reported Sean Duffy to the police for a certain harassment campaign he had been carrying out against the family of a young girl who had been knocked down and killed by a car, and despite the best efforts of a police detective from her area, the police in Duffy’s home city of Reading were ignoring it all. In short, Sean Duffy was getting off with it and I and others weren’t prepared to let the same thing happen in relation to these other scumbags. These ‘packages’ we saw as a quicker way to a certain kind of justice.

  In total, only eight trolls were on the receiving end of this very blunt form of justice: ‘SirAlex Ferguson,’ a then 18-year-old male (surname is Tindall) from Norfolk, England, and who as far as I am aware ceased his trolling after the screencaps of his activities were sent out. Damon Evans, then 19 and from Llangollen, Wales, a troll who I was later to help the BBC make a little bit infamous. Darren ‘Nimrod’ Burton, 41 when the packages went out, and his girlfriend whom he met through trolling, Kirsty Chapman, who is in her mid 30s and from England (although the packages weren’t sent to her then home area, her stuff was included in the Burton material. She now lives with Burton in the same area the screencaps were sent to). Hunter Mello, and an especially diseased and moronic little specimen from Indiana by the name of Holmes and who trolled as ‘Nashton Nigma,’ were the only Americans to have this done to them. A certain Jonathan H, aged around 30 and originally from Cardiff but then living in Northampton, England, and who trolled as ‘Dave Bomford’ was another; and then last, but by no means least, was Colm Coss, then aged 36 and from Ardwick, Manchester.

  *In 2012 one of the most prolific of those trolls that one set of these packages were sent out about tried to press harassment charges against me in relation to it all. A policeman contacted me about it and informed me that as six months had passed the statute of limitations on any potential harassment charge had expired. It is incredible how many of these RIP trolls have run to the police and complained of ‘harassment’ whenever their online bullying lives have caught up with them in their real lives.

  Coss made himself known to me in the April or the May of that year of 2010. His trolling had gained some notoriety after he had created a fake identity by the name of ‘Olivia Rooney’ and began daily making pages under it with names like ‘Jamie Bulger had it coming,’ or with sexually explicit references to Jamie Bulger. Jamie Bulger was a two-year-old boy from Liverpool who was abducted by two 10 year old boys in 1993 and brutally tortured and murdered. The case is notorious in Britain and in Liverpool especially it can still to this day cause heightened emotions. The pages Coss made drew in thousands of angry people all wanting blood and over 100 hate groups dedicated to finding this ‘Olivia Rooney’ had sprung up on Facebook. Soon, a real Olivia Rooney from Liverpool was having her picture and home address posted all over Facebook and beyond and cries were going up for her blood. I am not aware if she was in the end ever physically targeted but certainly the torches had been lit and the pitchforks had come out.

  Whether Coss had deliberately set this particular woman up or whether she was just unfortunate enough to share a name with a troll creation of his is something else on which I am unclear. I can’t remember exactly whether he was using her picture or not, and though he claimed for a time that he had deliberately set her up he later recanted and said her targeting had been an unintended (if welcome, to him) consequence. Perhaps this was because the heat was on him then, perhaps he was telling the truth. What I am clear on is that the danger that he had put her in became a source of immense pride for him and the empowerment he gained in himself from it caused him to go around Facebook for a long time afterwards harassing other women by threatening to ‘do an Olivia Rooney’ on them in turn. He certainly attempted to follow through with that threat on at least one other woman, again from Liverpool and again in relation to trolling about Jamie Bulger.

  As I have mentioned before, Co
ss is an alcoholic loner and an absolute basket case. He could indeed be held up as the archetypical RIP troll. Virtually all of his entire miserable existence is spent inside of his flat in Manchester where he drinks most of the day and all of the night alone and in a state of chronic depression, which he has taken out on the world via the Internet. True to the standard RIP troll model, he feels as if the world has crushed him down and that his haunting of grieving people online should be allowed as it is the least that the world owes him back. Bullied at school, he has never gotten over it and now feels as if he is getting his own back on the bullies of the greater world by trolling; with him being of the opinion that anyone who stands in his way is the real bully and not him. I have spoken to him on the phone and on Skype for a total of around two hours and can only assume that he would be a feast for the psychiatrist.

  ‘But what is ‘madness’?’ asked Coss of me during the first of those talks.

  You, Colm. You are what madness is.

  The psychotic workings of the minds of Coss and other trolls have convinced them that they have the absolute right to torment grieving people with obscenities about their lost children and that all of this shouldn’t come back on them simply because they decree that it should not come back on them. They have invented all these reasons and theories as to why there is nothing wrong with it. There is no telling them of any different morality, their insane minds cannot even begin to grasp that the world exists outside of their twisted perception of it. They will never, ever understand the concept of people other than their own selves mattering, even if at times some of them do fake remorse when facing consequences for their crimes.

  Trying to explain to these born psychopaths that the world and the people in it don’t run on the same kind of clockwork that makes the minds of RIP trolls tick is like trying to explain colour to a man born blind. Colm Coss gave me a great example of this during my first talk with him when I confronted him with some instances of grieving parents who have been ‘trolled’ over the deaths of their children speaking then through the media of how traumatised they were at being subjected to such attacks. Coss just kept trying to explain to me that because he found their added, troll-imposed trauma to be funny then they found it funny too, or at least didn’t mind it all that much. So he admits that he wants to upset further the grieving families whom he targets but to his mind that emotional upset should be, and is, understood by those same people to be just part of a game and is to be accepted - if not outright welcomed - by them with good humour. To Colm Coss, he is the one in the world who suffers more than anyone else and when he upsets a grieving family, as he has done many, many times, it is just his way of making them feel his pain - real pain - that they should feel but which he thinks they should also take in good humour, just as he jokes about his own life condition as well as moans about it. Just how insane is that I ask?! The mind boggles at such levels of hellish madness.

  With these actually unfathomable levels of madness running through the minds of these RIP trolls, is it any wonder that Coss and the rest of them see themselves as being the real victims of nasty bullying whenever they face real life consequences for their cyber savagery? It has always been the same from whichever troll has spoken on the subject: anti-trolls are the real bullies and trolls are the real victims. This is a genuinely held collective belief amongst them.

  So to Colm Coss, this anonymous vigilante who had outed his good mate Darren Burton and all those others was by far the biggest bully of them all and he was determined to bring me down. Coss had never accepted that I was Oliver Jackson and in his otherwise terribly dysfunctional mind he hatched what he thought was the master plan to end all master plans. Colm was to reveal himself to me as the ‘Olivia Rooney’ troll and then when I outed him online he was going to have the police arrest me for harassment. In Colm’s deluded and alcohol-soaked brain it seemingly never once occurred that if the police were going to take an interest in anyone’s activities in relation to this, then it most likely would not be mine. Again he showed his deeply-held belief that he and the others are the real victims who are doing nothing wrong.

  He also planned to goad me into calling him a paedophile online so that he could sue me for defamation. To get me to do this he began actually trolling RIP walls for dead children in his own name and with his own photograph and making totally obscene sexual remarks about them. He would then message me the links to the memorial pages where he was doing this, just to make sure that I could see his handiwork. Again his mind had failed to grasp the reality of it all as for me to libel Colm Coss I would have had to write things about him that would blacken his good name. It obviously had never occurred to Colm that his ‘good name’ was forever and a day blackened from the moment he started to use it to publish detailed sexual fantasies about dead children. What else I could have come up with to blacken a name like that even more is beyond my imagination to grasp.

  Then to cap it all off he posted this master plan in its entirety onto his Facebook profile so that the other trolls (and a watchful me) could know how clever he was. One of the trolls called him ‘a genius’ for thinking up this Baldrickesque cunning plan.

  ‘Thanks. I could eat 7 like Lonston for breakfast,’ gushed back the genius.

  So out went 20 packages from us addressed to Colm Coss’s neighbours.

  And in went Colm Coss to jail, becoming the first individual imprisoned in the UK for offences related to trolling.

  The news of his arrest had taken all of us in the anti-troll camp by surprise. Apparently, one of the recipients of the letters had went to the police and they had then raided Coss’s flat and took him in for questioning. I first got to hear of it when he came onto Facebook to moan about a police raid on his house which, much to my delight, he bitterly thanked me for. He told everyone that he had to be back ‘in the cop shop’ in 10 days to answer questions. He spent the first few of these 10 days making his disgusting presence felt on memorial pages for dead children but then quickly disappeared from Facebook after I rang up said cop shop to report this and was told by them that they would send someone around to his place. The trolls, gloriously deluded as ever, convinced themselves that the cops wanted him to come back and tell them who his tormentor was, and I received numerous gloating messages from them telling me that my time was up at last. Then on October 9th appeared online a report from the UK national newspaper The Daily Mail that one Colm Coss of Ardwick, Manchester, had appeared in court to plead guilty to offences under the UK’s Malicious Communications Act. He was to be sentenced at a later hearing. The report carried a photograph of a desperately unhappy looking cultural critic outside the court and appearing as if he were about to burst into tears.

  Even though the Mail had for some reason reported that he himself had sent out the letters, we all knew what had really taken place.* Epic win didn’t even begin to cover it. This, we all thought, was the beginning of the end for the British RIP trolls.

  *During my first voice conversation with Coss I asked him about why the Daily Mail and then other news sources had reported that he had sent the letters himself and he replied that he believes it was a court reporter’s mishearing of the evidence which started off that chain of mistaken reportage. He expressed embarrassment that he was reported as having sent out the letters himself, which made him look crazy in his opinion. Well I suppose it didn’t help, but most people would probably have had you down as a little bit crazy anyway considering what you were up for, Colm.

  (The 2012 BBC documentary ‘The Anti-Social Network’ put things straight with a policewoman confirming that the letters came from people outside the area who had gathered evidence on Colm Coss).

  Well it hasn’t exactly worked out like that but Coss’s subsequent 18 week jail sentence did at least pave the way for future prosecutions of these types of trolls in Britain, and a great credit has to go to Greater Manchester Police for taking it all seriously enough to act so quickly when many other police forces in England and Wales have done thei
r best to ignore the whole thing for years. His imprisonment made the headlines on the local BBC television news that evening in Manchester and was reported on in many of the British national dailies, vindicating those of us who had been taking RIP trolling seriously enough to act against it. The court heard Coss had admitted that he ‘preyed on bereaved families’ for his ‘own pleasure’ and that he had stated that he felt no remorse about it. Even though - as some later released audio from his police interviews revealed - he had, incredibly, tried initially to make the police ‘understand’ that the ‘grief tourists’ were to blame, he did finally admit to them that he enjoyed targeting the families themselves.

  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.