U R NEXT | 3. Unprisonable. Untouchable.

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Listen to every episode of you are next at free right now when you subscribe to the binge. You'll hear the entire series before anyone else. Get exclusive bonus episodes and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to the binge channel on Apple podcasts and tap subscribe or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. The binge. Feed your true crime obsession. Imagine you're in Disneyland. You're with your family surrounded by thousands of other people.

The California Sun is warm on your skin. Shrieks of laughter echo as people loop to loop on huge roller coasters.

Magic is literally all around you. The Disney kind anyway. It's a place where dreams come true,

“where you momentarily forget your problems, gorege on over-priced sorrows and walk on marathons worth of steps”

as you skip from one ride to the next. The happiest place on earth where nothing bad could ever happen. It's January 25, 2014, about 430 in the afternoon. A couple miles away is the parks customer call center. It's one of those days where all the phones are ringing off the hook. I literally had just gone from one phone call to the next. This is someone we're calling Luke. He's a manager at Disney's call center. He wouldn't normally be on the phones, but there's a real rush on. When the phone cue got kind of crazy, I jumped in and just started taking phone calls to help out. I just answered the phone.

Yes, the information took it sales. And the first thing that he said was, "There's a bomb at Space Mountain."

And it took me a second to process what he had said. I'm sorry, where did you say it was? And he said, "It's the Space Mountain." I have tons of friends that are working there right now. Fearful for all the guests in the park, imagining how many people were probably there at the time. Luke swallows his fear. He breathes deeply, tries to push away thoughts of his friends and customers in danger and remember his training. Keep the guy on the phone for as long as you can and get as much information as possible.

Kind of like what the protocol had said. Every time I started asking questions, I could tell he was getting irritated and he would just say,

“"There's a bomb there. You need to do something about that."”

While he was talking, I was hitting that emergency button on our phones to let the resource desk know and of course that emergency button on my phone wasn't working. And so I stood up and I was like, "Wave in my hand to try to get there attention." Eventually, another manager notices Luke's panic signal and rushes over. Luke's still trying to keep the caller on the line. I try to get specifics out of him. I was like, "Well, where in Space Mountain?

Is it in the queue? Is it somewhere in the attraction? Where is it?" The caller then tells Luke it's not just one bomb. It's four. He's placed two of them inside the attraction and two outside. He also says he's staying in a nearby hotel. Luke tries to stall for more time. He asks the caller which hotel he's staying in. He got fed up with all my questions.

That's when he just hung up. There was police on scene almost immediately. Disneyland can have up to 85,000 visitors at any one time. Space Mountain is in a part of the park called Tomorrowland. It's one of the most popular attractions in the park, tucked far away from any of the entries or exits. They ended up evacuating all at Tomorrowland.

10 to 20,000 people probably had to be evacuated. The police won't want to cause panic or shout about multiple bombs. They'll want to keep the crowd calm as they evacuate as quickly as possible. But the visitors in the park must know that something seriously wrong.

concerts, marathons flashing through their minds.

Once the cops have finally cleared the area of panic families, they send in trained bomb

detection dogs to sniff out the scene. But after a full sweep, they make the same realization that Sergeant Ben Finley did. It's all bullshit. My media reaction was relief. Just being happy that nobody got hurt.

“And then more anger after that, why would you want to cause panic for no reason?”

Luke doesn't know it yet, but he's been dupped by the same online criminal that Ben is busy tracking across the USA and beyond. One kind of person does that. Especially in the amusement park,

it has so many people in it who are there for only one reason, and that's to have a good time

and enjoy it, so for their family. It does make you wonder, is he trying to see what he can do to get the most bang for the buck? I mean, is he tired of this individual? Is he trying to reach out on a broader scale and create more havoc? What's the motivation of this guy? I wonder that too. What would drive this perp to move from swatting an individual person to terrifying and traumatizing thousands of people in one fell swoop?

“In order to figure that out and more importantly to catch him, Ben's going to have to roll up his”

sleeves and really get to work. From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, this is You Our Next. I'm Lea Alexander. This is Episode 3. Unprisonable. Untouchable. It's around early spring 2014. Ben's been trying for weeks to find information on the guy who attempted to swat the family in John's Creek back on January 25th, when he called and said

he planted multiple napalm bombs in their house. When Ben got on the case, one of the first things

he did was subpoena Skype for information on the phone number this swatter used. Those call logs are how he discovered the Disneyland swatting that happened on the same day as the one in John's Creek.

“A few weeks on, Ben is in his office still drowning in those Skype call logs.”

It was an absolute boat load of data that they sent me and I was like, "Oh God, I spent the next I couldn't tell you how many hours and days going through that entire thing and it kind of overwhelmed me." I said, "I got to figure out what I'm doing here so I can see it because I've got a visual eye stuff so I had a big white board in our conference room and I went down in there and I just drew like little squares." I said, "All right, here's today's time. Here's

the phone number. I got this. All right, I went from here to here." When in doubt analogued out, that should be Ben's motto. Nobody was holding my hand. Nobody was guiding me. I was learning by the numbers as I went. Slowly but surely it starts to pay off. Ben's making more and more sense of this mountain of data before him.

He starts building a database every place they got hit by this guy. Oh, there's my guy's number right here. There's my guy's number right here. There's this number again. Arties calling this number, this number, this number, this number. Turns out Space Mountain was just the tip of a very large iceberg. Shnuck's supermarket in St. Charles, Walmart and West Hills California, Walmart and Simeon Valley

calling mom friends. Ben calls up every single place on this list. All of them had been swatted. Pine Valley middle school, Santa Mone, called in a bomb threat at the school cleared the whole school out. I want those pieces in Santa Mone. He ordered an absolute ton of pieces in this place one night. Shit somebody. And that's just one page. God knows how many this guy did. I'm sure this guy has the limit.

Scouring through the logs Ben sees that the guy he's after definitely isn't just focusing on specific personal targets people in their homes. He made more than a hundred calls on a single day.

phone logs, I'm noticing a lot of administrative line numbers for government agencies.

“555-4,000 or 555-2,000. That's normally like a law enforcement agency switchboard line.”

Ben thinks back to the first swatting he worked. How the caller used the admin line to be connected

through to 911 dispatch. He knows this is a swatting tactic because calls to the cops non-emergency line are harder to trace. He had called Fairfax County Police, In Virginia, Ogden Police Department in Utah, Toronto Police Department, Senwa King Sheriff's Office, Alfredo Police Department, which is my Jackson County Sheriff's Office Missouri Racing Police Department, Wisconsin Waterloo Regional Police and Canada,

and Boston Police Department Massachusetts. Tons of different agencies that just got called every one of these

“places. Ben knows that each and every one of these calls made to those police switchboards”

was a different swatting attempt. A hundred different tales of gruesome murders of bombs planted around neighborhoods, countless families ambushed with an army of machine gun-wielding cops breaking down their front door. The scale of this is beginning to dawn on Ben. The guy he's after is clearly on a rampage and Ben needs to stop him. So I started calling these different

numbers and I would like get to their investigations and I was like hey man,

you guys have a vault so now one one call or a hook so now one call on this day in time and somewhere in your city of your county and they're like well you know about it.

“I'm investigating one in my jurisdiction. I have a phone long here and it absolutely”

shows your number on this particular day in time and that's probably going to be the same individual. So now I was calling these guys and asking about this. I say you have audio of the person that called and they're like yeah I can share that with me but I play mine. I just tell me this sounds like your guy. I just shot my parents with a loaded AR case. I'm gonna go to my other neighbors and I'm gonna shoot up the entire block to a high school

and I'm blowing it up him. What you're hearing are reenactments of real calls all made by Ben's Purp to different police stations all across the USA and if I see any police I'm trying the policemen shooting a police in the head and they go at this stage Ben probably knows more than any other cop in the US about this swatter but even then it's not much. Ben's only a few weeks into his investigation at this point. It's months yet before Esther will be targeted so Ben's pretty

much in the dark. Still trying to build a profile of this mystery swatter figure out what kind of mindset he's going up against. He can tell from the voice that he's not dealing with a fellow southerner. He also knows from those FBI bulletins that the profile of a swatter usually fits a teenage gamer and someone who's got this much free time to call this many places definitely doesn't seem like they're an adult with a full-time job responsibilities and you know a life.

But other than those assumptions Ben doesn't have anything concrete nothing but can help him track this guy down and uncover his identity. Luckily that's about to change with a little help from some friends up north. Thank innovative press-broude technology. Every task special in the aromatic with the same programmer. And there's the cube capsule machine in your Chibofiale and on the Chibode E.

When you think of Minnesota there's a good chance you think of the beautiful freshwater lakes.

could ever handle. That and obviously the iconic accents of Fargo.

“Hey, they said they were going to the Twin Cities. Oh yeah? Yeah. Yeah, is that useful to you?”

Oh yeah, Betcha, yeah. Yeah. Something else you think of is them just being plain helpful. It's literally called Minnesota Nice. Ben's still making his way through the list of police precincts his purpose called. I make a phone call up to the Burnsville Minnesota Police Department. Ben gets a detective on the phone named Brian. He breaks down what he's working on, how he's tracking this swatter, who seems to have targets all over the country.

He plays in the clip of the January 25th John's Creek call. I have four B118 Therware Barric Napon bombs. Now I have them all set on a timer. They go up exactly. And as soon as he heard it, he goes, I said why I guess. I know how Canadian is talking around them all the time. The Minnesota

“sits right on the border with Canada. Well, fantastic. Brian, I appreciate your buddy.”

What did I tell you? Minnesota Nice. Finally, Ben has got his first real clue

to this swatter's identity and his location. Along with a library's worth of call logs, Ben also gets a username and email associated with this Skype account of his swatter. Both have the word doxing in them. Doxing, meaning posting someone's personal and private information online, like their home address, for example, which leaves them wide open to swatting attempts. Ben investigates this doxing email address and it leads him to a website with a username

plastered across the top. Ben clicks on the about section, which reveals something interesting.

I'm a 16 year old system administrator, security researcher, and software engineer, location,

“Canada currently unemployed. A teenager check, Canada check, Ben can feel a hunch forming in his gut.”

The website links to a Twitter account with the same username. That Twitter account is where Ben strikes gold. As he scrolls, Ben's seeing confession after confession. I just swatted a Cupertino address if anyone wants to listen to the radio. Or more accurately, this guy is bragging. Should I live stream myself swatting people in an hour or two, I'm going to live it up and swap like 60 places. Ben's certain this is his purpose. His email and social accounts are linked

to the Skype number that's made countless swatting calls. And here he is not only openly admitting to swatting multiple people, but saying he'll live stream it too. Seems like he wants credit from fellow gamers who will get a kick out of watching his chaos unfold. Ben can't believe he's being so brazen admitting to the countless crimes he's committing and the victims he's targeting. It's like he's purposefully waving his behavior right under the police's nose.

So Ben keeps digging. He wants to find out if anyone online has been talking about this guy. I kept seeing his name pop up here, seeing his name pop up here. Ben finds post after post from different social media accounts. All of them talking about this guy, only by his username. They know who the send a visual is. A lot of the gaming platforms he would be on there playing with them. If he got beat, it would put him into a psychotic fit. He would go crazy. That's when he would

turn his wrath upon them and try to figure out who they were and destroy them and destroy their website or hack their Twitter profile or whatever he could do. He would do it. He'd clicked his pain and anger out on them to try to exact some type of revenge for losing the game. These posts from other users talk about how the guy Ben's after has a habit of targeting young female streamers in particular. How he would harass them constantly, dox them, send

pizzas to their houses and swap them. Exactly what he'd go on to do to Esther, who woke up in the middle of the night to a cop standing over her with an automatic weapon. The posts also talk about how he brags openly about what he does and how much he loves the attention it brings him. I don't want this podcast to give him the attention he's so obviously craves. So my production team and I are making a conscious choice not to tell you his real username.

But we are going to call him something and with everything we know about what he's done

So Ben's got a website, a username and some social media accounts, but he needs more. He needs to find out vicious is true identity. I would get on some of these different message boards that these kids have that they put stuff on there. Like, you know, they would dock each other and put all their information on there. And this is so and so and this is so and so. Ben's he's opposed on the message board.

It's all text. It talks about a teenager from Canada and it lists a bunch of user names and aliases, including the one on vicious's website. It also includes a bunch of

“email addresses linked to vicious, which Ben has seen before. That's what I have on my list.”

I wonder if this is my God. Ben keeps reading his eyes widening with each line. In amongst all the emails and social media accounts, this post lists a full name, date of birth and home address. Ben might have just found his swatters true identity.

But he knows he can't rely on some posts on a message board as proof. It's basically hearsay.

He needs more. So he has a little further up north, searching for some Canadian nice. I'd call the RCMP up there. The Royal Canadian mounted police, aka the Mounties. Ben's hoping they can give him the inside scoop on vicious. Maybe he can even convince them to join his investigation or launch one of their own. He's going to need Canadian authorities assistance to take this case all the way. Ben outlines his investigation to the

Mounties. He shares his hunch that this Canadian teenager is the person behind the vicious persona as well as the evidence he's been collecting over the harassment and swadding of gamers all across

“the US. I said this is what I think he is. When Ben gives them vicious his real name,”

he can tell the Mounties know who he's talking about. But the officer on the other end of the phone is tight-lipped. He's like, "No, I can't tell you anything about that individual." Ben doesn't think the Mounties are just being deliberately evasive. Our criminal evidence procedure is different from the states. This is Gary Young. He's a staff sergeant within the RCMP. Our level of standard of charge approval. They are

a really, really tall order. We needed statements from the victim. Some counties or some smaller town a police officer himself would just write a report and that's a statement

and that would be good enough. But what's good enough for the USA is not always good enough for

Canada. I understand that potential frustration. I truly understand that. It's like how do you tell somebody that's been tying their shoes? They were like tying with a double knot is good enough. Then all of a sudden, double knot in your shoe. It does the job. The shoe stays on, but we need it in a bow to meet our threshold. Ben doesn't have everything tied up in a bow. He's got a knot of evidence tied up with his own hunches. One of the other biggest obstacles

to sharing information is Vicious's age. He's a minor, so he's a four-to-special privileges. Since he's a juvenile, they were like to tell anything. Ben can sense that he's on the right track, that Vicious is the 16-year-old who was doxed online and that he's also firmly on the RCMP's radar. But because he doesn't have the cold, hard proof that Vicious and this 16-year-old Canadian are one in the same, the RCMP's hands are tied. The RCMP aren't allowed to share what they

know about an underage suspect, particularly across international borders, even to a fellow law enforcement officer like Ben. What's worse, Vicious seems to know this, too. Another of his tweets says, "American police won't do shit. I'm honest, relatable, unreasonable, untouchable." I felt the disappointment kind of rollover on me, because when I told my boss, he can't

“always say, "What do you got?" And I said, "I think this son of a gun lives in freaking Canada."”

And he's a juvenile. He's just laughing, he goes, "Ernk, shit, you can do about that, man." Ben's going to see about that. He might be down, but he's not out yet.

"I never liked losing, you know what I mean? I never liked having bad people beat me,

no matter if it was in the medical where there's some law enforcement." He starts looking back through Vicious's Twitter feed to see if he's made a mistake.

Vicious likes to post, he notices something really fucked up.

“"I started finding all these pictures of these young girls."”

"Young girls with Vicious's user names scrolled across their foreheads and black marker." "I was like, what does that about?" "I kept going and looking and finding more and more more stuff." "I found out just what an absolute animal this guy is." A perfecter-freelinks-tark.

"Sone, pack, picnic, and so many pollen." "Shop-A-Poteek" says, "Gis, algae, and halo-freelinks." Here, if you're all at the same time, you'll be able to come through the allergy time. As a new customer, you're about 10% up to 35 euros per day. With the code, "Neu, 10."

"Do you have your time?" "Shop-A-Poteek at Brontaladen" and "Direct one-listen." "Goodsign" means, "Shop-A-Poteek.com/goodsign."

“"In our room for your podcast, Frisches, Obst, and Knackieg's Gemüse from Aldi,”

"immergut, immer günstig, immer vielfältig." "Kurts" says, "Frische for all?" "To Aldi price, this week, Cess Brissangold Kiwi." "That's stück, for 0.5.50 cents." "Or dunkle taffeltrauben, 500 grams, for 0.1 euros, 9.70 cents."

"In a decade, there are many ways to take care of Aldi, not Villale, and weitergeets, einfach lauschen und genießen. Aldi. "Goods, for all."

When Ben first sees picture after picture of teenage girls posted all over Vicious's Twitter,

he can't wrap his head around it. But it soon becomes all too disgustingly clear. He had somehow hacked into their eye cloud, or something like that, and got all their pictures on their phone. He would go in, call these girls, and threaten them.

I'm going to release all your information, all your pictures, and all your nudes, and everything else." I can only imagine what it was like for them the first time that happened to them, because they're probably in a room by themselves. Sitting there with their headphones, I don't do anything.

And all of a sudden, this random person shows up on your screen, and then next thing you know, they've hacked into your account. It's designed to obviously put fear in a lot of people. Ben tells me Vicious's coerces teenage girls into sending him photos of themselves with his username written on their foreheads.

Even worse, Vicious also coerces them into sending nude photographs directly to him. If they didn't cooperate, he would just unleash holy terror upon these people. And they would do it to try to get this animal to leave him alone. Not to that stop him, no. Because he turned around and post all the crap out anywhere.

This one girl, he took all of her pictures that ran her phone, and some of those were, unfortunately, for her, semi-nude photographs of herself that she'd sent the boys and whatnot, and he sent it to everyone in her contact list. People in her family, her grandmother, people in her church.

So imagine everybody that she knows in your contact list,

“got a semi-picture beauty day, how would that wreck your life?”

And these 15-year-old girls were talking about, these are not grown women. These are little girls. Ben tries to reach out to some of these young girls, but often they're too terrified to talk to him. They don't want to risk more retaliation.

I can understand how weary they are and how chill-shocked they were just going to not answer anything I sent to, no matter what I sent to them. This is something my team and I experienced while making this podcast too. So many ambitious as victims don't want to risk talking about what they've been through. Some are still scared 10 years on that he'll come after them for speaking out,

and some just don't want to relive it all again. But dozens of them have the same stories. Harassment threats abuse followed by coercive promises that it would stop if they sent him photos of themselves. And whether they did or didn't, he would find a way to violate them anyway. One young woman who didn't want to be interviewed for the podcast, but did share information with us,

told us that Vicious first followed her on Twitter and then became obsessed with her.

He hacked into her Skype account and added about 20 people to a video call.

Her bedroom was being live streamed.

As Ben takes deeper, he sees Vicious is publicly bragging about everything he's doing to his victims. If he sees some of the things he types, some of the things he says and how he speaks to these girls, he's just about nasty animal. Vicious isn't hiding his degeneracy. He's reveling in it. This could be just another example of Vicious's courting notoriety and attention to the point of insanity.

Whatever it takes to further his extreme reputation.

But it's clear to me that Vicious is a predator, a young one, but not any less dangerous for that fact.

“How funny would it be if I posted his news on her own Twitter?”

No amount of talking nice to this person's gonna work. No amount of hey, man, he needs to stop. He's gonna work. All that's gonna do is motivate them to go even further. This guy was literally just absolutely taking great pleasure and glee at doing what he was doing to these girls. I have two daughters and if this guy had done something like this to my daughter, I want to go find this guy grab him around the neck and beat him stupid.

Yeah, leave that just. It angered me to no end. So I didn't give a damn if he lived in Canada or not. I said I'm gonna do everything I can to do something to this guy. On the next episode of You Are Next.

“Sergeant Ben Finley is ready to go to war.”

But while he's only just figured out what kind of guy he's dealing with, I've discovered that Vicious's trail of destruction and degradation started months before January 2014. I was an earlier victim. He was watching all our streams to look for information of something he could explain. Although Vicious's targets haven't been waiting around for a cop like Ben to fight their battles. They've been busy figuring out Vicious's tactics. We found an information because of

these other girls in their efforts and they're fighting back for themselves. The community helped punish bad players. [Music]

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Check out the binge channel page on Apple podcasts or get the binge.com to learn more. This is You Are Next and the original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, hosted by me, Lee Alexander. Lee Meyer is our senior producer. Verity de Cala is our assistant producer. Sandra Schmoulli is our editor. Production management from Shuri Houston, Joe Savage and Charlotte Wolf.

For Novel, our executive producer is Max O'Brien. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Story development by Nell Gray Andrews, Willard Foxton and Selena Metta, who is director of development for Novel. Special thanks to Carolyn Scherlevin at Miller-Coresonic Raymond LLP and to Ford Collier, who performed a woodwind for our theme music. And a big thanks to the whole Sony Music Entertainment team.

I'm not a fan of you. I'm a fan of my story. How do you feel about the story? I have a lot of time to get back to you. Have you ever known about the story? No, I'm just a fan of you. Wow. And that's just a story. Of course, the world is automatically all. It's so exciting to hear your story. Tiefen Entspand with Viso Stoia.