Hackers on Steroids

by Oisín Sweeney

  While a great many of the RIP trolls use female personas to troll with - this to make themselves seem less threatening to potential targets, or to manipulate male targets with - the number of authentic females in their groupings tends to be much smaller. I would estimate that in that one large trolling ring, only about 10% to 15% of them were actually female. Those figures include a sizeable number of what I call ‘the groupies’: bored and needy girls and women who hang out with the ‘bad boys’ online for cheap and nasty trills but don’t RIP troll, so the number of actual female RIP trolls is even smaller again. The presence of such a small number of females among such a large group of horny males leads to all the jealousies and competitiveness and fighting and hilarity that you would expect. When trolls were wanting their own back on other trolls over tangled love affairs they sometimes came to me with dox, and the online sexual shenanigans and heart-breaking and leaking of nude photographs that took place - and I expect still take place (to save me from dying of tedium I have mostly just stopped looking altogether now) - in that great troll soap opera could fill another book. Mad Malcolm Blackman even seems to harbour a genuine, everlasting and unrequited love for ‘Mallory Knox,’ not realising that the troll is a male playing a female (or at least I don’t think that he realises this). It was the messy and brilliantly entertaining end of Darren Burton’s online love affair with an Australian who called herself ‘Missy Nimrod’ that gifted me with his home address and so led to the packages arriving in his Cardiff neighbourhood.

  Many times trolls have fallen in love with each other, with most of them falling quite quickly out of it again with sometimes magnificently entertaining results. It was indeed the ending of a love affair between two trolls that sparked off the Great Troll War of 2010, leading eventually to the death of the hundreds-strong trolling ring of that time. The dearth of females in the pack means that when one love affair ends the chances are that an available female troll will be then snapped up by another male, which more often than not leads to another round of jealous handbagging among the members of the Internet’s greatest tragi-clown troupe. Jealously, backstabbing, revenge, and subterfuge are constants in that quasi-secret troll world. Indeed there was one bizarre and amusing episode where rumours were spread - as far as I can ascertain anyway - by one exceptionally weird troll groupie of my involvement in a love affair with her, and I can only guess that my name was used as a repellent to put off Colm Coss as she had at an earlier time when she used to flirt with me confided that she was living in a state of fear after he said that he was going to take a flight across the Atlantic and call at her door such was his love for her. ‘Missy Nimrod’ was another who also claimed that I was in love with her, although I believe that was a forlorn attempt to make Darren Burton jealous. Burton’s response to all of her games was to try and ruin her life. I’m not sure if I come out of all of that as a sex symbol or an anti-sex symbol for troll groupies but it does help illustrate that many of those female followers find themselves in way over their heads, playing online with psychotic obsessives who are prone to taking break-ups of even e-love affairs very badly indeed. What these groupies are after is a safe and distant dalliance with the dark side, just like those women who strike up pen pal relationships with murderers who are on death row; but they’re playing with fire and none of them seem to realise it until comes the inevitable moment when they get burned and begin to run around in a panic trying to douse the flames. The old maxim ‘I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire’ comes to mind here.

  A fair number of the female trolls and groupies have tried to play at being sirens with me, attempting to lure me over to them with flashes of their wares so that I could crash on the rocks of the doxed. The only thing is that - unlike the Sirens of mythology - these enchantresses have forgotten to actually, er, enchant before revealing the horror of their true selves. ‘Show me ya face and I’ll bloody show ya my tits,’ purred Missy Nimrod to me on Skype during the period in which she was feuding with Burton and when I was trying to convince her that him e-dumping her was such an unforgivable act that it warranted giving me his home address. I almost told her that I’d show her my face if she didn’t show me her tits, but the talks were at too delicate a stage then for that.

  The desperate attempts to dox me by this ‘Internet elite’ as they have oftentimes referred to themselves have been a consistent source of amusement to me down the years. There is an Internet-famous Fox News television report from 2007 that breathlessly talks about ‘hackers on steroids’ in relation to the users of an unnamed website but which is very obviously 4Chan’s /b/ board. The trolls on Facebook, the vast majority of whom are deeply steeped in 4Chan culture, simultaneously mock this tabloidesque description of what they see as being them themselves yet at the same time believe every single word of it. They have taken to heart the idea that they are some special secret elite hacker force which can seek and destroy any target anywhere at any time, and that no one’s personal information is safe from the deadly powers of detection possessed by the Hackers on Steroids (or HOS to give them their proper terrorist acronym).

  So let’s have a look at just some of the dark and devious means that these Facebook-based steroid-injecting doxers have employed down the years to try and get my dox or to just simply make me leave them alone:

  Ringing up the ITN news network to complain that I was bullying them and demanding of them my name and address.

  The Colm Coss master plan to bring me down, approved by trolls as the work of no less than a genius.

  At least a dozen of them contacting the police more times than I can even remember to tell them that I was bullying them and demanding that they put me in jail. Three of the worst of them have even convinced wary police officers to warn me off having any contact with them again in the future such was the stress that I was causing the poor little darlings.

  The ‘WeAre Legion’ ultimatum.

  Ringing up various TV media companies and newspapers and demanding that they investigate me for bullying trolls.

  Sending out their best camwhores to try and entice my dox out of me with flashes of their questionable wares.

  Threatening me on many occasions that if I didn’t go away and leave them alone that they’d tell Anonymous on me.

  When all else failed, demanding of me that I just simply meet up with them in real life and fight them.

  So I did find it to be a blessed relief when I realised that the particular faction of the HOS which I was dealing with were the People’s Front of Judea of cyberterrorists. The one of their number most fixated with bringing me down is one I outed in 2010 and who has ever since then lived, breathed, ate, and slept his hilarious obsession with me. He has a myriad of ever-changing identities but is best known to all just simply as ‘Rooney,’ as ‘Robert Rooney’ is his most consistent handle. From near Manchester, his real surname is Dunn and he is in strong competition with the best of them for the most raving mad fruitcake of all. Roon the Loon is in his mid-30s and there are saner people to be found out there in the fields eating grass. Ever since I doxed him he has been on an obsessive mission to get me jailed and has come up with plans so unspeakably stupid that I sometimes have wondered if his real plan to get rid of me isn’t to just make me laugh myself to death at him; him and the whole sorry little lot of them. Fancying himself as something of a self-taught expert in both British and international law, Roon the Loon acts as the legal guru to the HOS (Facebook Brigade) and has had numerous trolls run to the police after advising them that I was, among other things, breaking a European Human Rights law FOR NATIONS by doxing them, and that I have been inciting hate speech against a minority by calling them scumbags. Yes, he had trolls go to the police and complain that they as trolls were part of a protected minority being victimised by some bully on the Internet.

  Ah god, just imagine the scene in a police station when one of them arrived in there to say that. Just imagine.

  Ah holy mother of god.

  It is his genius
for stupidity that made me fall in love with the idea of having a Rooney for a pet and so caused me to write away to Santa one Christmas to ask him to bring me one, but he only wrote back telling me not to be so stupid as I am too old now to believe in things as silly as Rooney. Yet still he exists. I have actually started making a scrapbook filled only with printouts of his finest moments. Reading it is funnier than a swim in a lake of nitrous oxide.

  He’s obviously a complete headcase and perhaps I shouldn’t have had the fun with him that I did over the years, but then again they’re all headcases and when you find a monkey which dances for you this well then it’s hard not to be a bastard. Get those trolls trolled. Probably my favourite time that I had with him was when I for fun ‘doxed’ myself as being his real identity, that of Dunn from near Manchester. I ‘came out’ as being him and asked the trolls what they were going to do about it. I claimed that all Dunn’s many guises were me having infiltrated the trolls to learn their secrets. This caused Dunn’s head to explode and led to the strangest experience that I have ever had while not dreaming when he made close to 100 posts in about 15 minutes trying to prove to me that I wasn’t him when all the while I just kept claiming to him that I was him. I think that in the end he wasn’t sure whether I was telling him the truth or not.

  Ada Florence Brady so why are you called lonston?

  Ada Florence Brady you

  Ada Florence Brady YOU!

  Mike Lonston It’s because I am you.

  Ada Florence Brady explain! you wanna cunt me! EXPLAIN!

  Ada Florence Brady explain it in a true way and I will admit to being you, my head is spinning with your falsehoods, you may just win!

  Ada Florence Brady and don’t forget that Mello works for me even after he was doxed, come on your big moment, explain!

  Ada Florence Brady TICK TOCK

  Ada Florence Brady EXPLAIN!

  Ada Florence Brady you have no proof

  Ada Florence Brady EXPLAIN!

  Ada Florence Brady everyone is laughing you. EXPLAIN!

  I suppose you could say that he Dunn goofed. It was all as surreal as a Monty Python sketch. I thought for a while that I was going to die and I could almost see the laughter coming out of the top of my own head. It took me to a higher state of consciousness. I have little doubt that alcoholic Dunn, who once described himself to me as ‘Machiavellian,’ is as he reads this seriously entertaining thoughts of writing a counterpoint book to this one, one which exposes the tormentors of trolls as the real bad guys. He seems to have contacted just about every journalist or television news producer in Britain over the years to demand of them that they do a story exposing an evil online vigilante who bullies poor little innocent RIP trolls (one media person told me on one instance of a strange man with a Manchester accent ringing up their offices to scream down the phone about me. ‘He sounded very upset.’). At other times he has tried to escape the torment of being doxed by cleverly faking his own death. Eyebrows, though, were raised on all of those occasions as he always made the fatal error of announcing the tragic news himself.

  Aside from spending his days and nights plotting ever more comical schemes to have me exposed or arrested (another of them involved him ringing up Crimestoppers to complain that if I wasn’t stopped from saying nasty things about RIP trolls then someone was going to kill a troll, because presumably no-one would have noticed how horrible they are if not for me pointing it out to them), he has also used his dark Machiavellian powers to try and scare me off by posing as (and these are only just a small number of examples): an ex-CIA agent brought out of retirement by the US government with an order to chase me up for spreading the dox; as the last surviving member of a violent gang with a gun in his hand and nothing left to lose (all the rest of the gang members having been found murdered in a forest – possibly by Dunn himself in an act of vengeance carried out after a double-cross pulled on a heist); and as the spokesman for a range of anti-bullying charities which were going to file a class action lawsuit against me for ‘giving anti-bullying a bad name.’ This I could only stop by leaving the Internet immediately, never to return. You can tell for sure that it is Dunn every time just by simply dropping his dox to him and then sitting back and watching him erupt as he goes on a 15-hit-combo posting spree.

  ‘Where is the proof??!! WHERE IS THE PROOF THAT I AM HIM!!??’ he will eventually end up screaming every time that his name is mentioned to him, even when he is posting under one of his devious disguises of dastardliness. Well, the answer is that I have that proof, Mr Dunn. I have it good. But I have it hidden away safely under lock and key in a secret location somewhere and should anything untoward happen to me – such as my being shot down by a gun-toting gangster out for one final, terrible act of revenge before he goes down in a blaze of glory; or me being processed for extraordinary rendition by an out-of-retirement CIA superspy desperate to stop the dox - then that proof shall be opened by persons unknown to you and released to the world. And, by god, you will be one sorry little troll then. But until then, I plan on keeping that proof safe in my ultra-secret hiding place as I may need it to bargain with one day. Possibly for my very life.

  It’s hard not to laugh at them when they’re like this. As horrible as what else they do is, it’s hard not to fucking laugh at them themselves. They go around seeking out tragedy to laugh at so let’s all everyone else instead laugh at the tragedies that are them. Because knowing what they do, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at their tragedy. There was one of them, an Australian man in his 40s dead now by his own hand and claimed as a victim of the Troll Wars, driven, so Baloney and his ‘Council’ claim, to suicide after they trolled him that hard. Probably not true, he was most likely on his way out anyway but at any rate the world’s better off without him in it trolling walls for dead children. No human beings were harmed, nothing to worry about here, folks. ‘Ken E Dahl’ he called himself online; I winded him up once by telling him that I was going to cut his legs off and beat him with them if he didn’t stop annoying me when I was having a conversation with someone on some open Facebook group. For almost the next two weeks he daily sent me messages like this one:

  Why do I still have legs bitch? you'll not take my legs bitch! come at me bitch!!! I’ll fuck you up - YOU BITCH!!!

  In his 40s he was. When they’re fighting online with each other or with others you can often see them threatening to unleash the big guns on people: ‘Oh wait till my best trolling bro gets here tonight, bitch! He’ll fuck your shit up, you bitch! Yeah you’ll be one sorry bitch then, bitch!’ And often their troll opponents will be like: ‘NO he won’t - I’ll fuck HIS shit up, bitch! HIS!! You got it the wrong way about ya stupid bitch! Yeah so bring it! Come on and BRING IT BITCH!’

  One of them, a Californian in his 20s and goes most usually by the name ‘Brad Staubitz,’ spoke once of a woman he was having some sort of problem with online. Finding out that she is listed as a midwife, he said: ‘The stupid useless bitch can’t even get fully married, stupid bitch can only get half married.’

  There echoes on Facebook the collective voice of the one thousand drooling imbeciles who at some point or another have passed through the hallways of the electronic labyrinth that is the world of that one gathering of psycho-trolls and the sound that can be heard of all those voices raised together as one is: ‘COME AT ME BITCH - YOU BITCH!’

  For the Internet truly is the revenge of the nerds. Give a Colm Coss the power to ‘do an Olivia Rooney’ on someone and he is going to take that gift and run with it, his settling of scores with the world. The fear and intimidation that they can inspire in their targets, the control they can have over them, the notoriety they can gain among their online friends and followers. These sociopaths have become drunk with power in their fantasy land and have become addicted to that power. You can’t put a loaded gun into the hands of a deranged killer and expect him not to shoot people with it. Yet Facebook can be a highly dangerous tool in the wrong hands and its system gives these sever
ely unhinged cyberpaths a gun with an infinite number of bullets in it and potentially hundreds of millions of people to aim at. Sooner or later an innocent person is going to have an ‘Olivia Rooney’ or a ‘Dale Angerer’ or an ‘Oliver Jackson’ done on them and the bullets are going to really find their target. I have lost count of the number of times that I have witnessed these psychotic so-called trolls steal an innocent person’s identity and attack memorial pages with it in the hopes of inciting a real-world attack on the person whom they have chosen to impersonate. Unsuspecting people have been angered enough to spit out venomous death threats against that person, or to make promises to come around and burn down that individual’s house. Someday it’s going to manifest into a physical reality; and indeed I know of a case where only for prompt police action, it would have. And saying all that, who knows - it may have already. I can’t say that it hasn’t.