If you want a deeper look behind Cut Color Kill, now is the time.
Join our free newsletter at patreon.com/thabinge and you will get exclusive story details.
You can't get anywhere else. Again, join me at patreon.com/thabinge. 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.
“Someone basically said you should start streaming and I was like, "Sure.”
This is Natasha. That's not her real name. We've changed it to try to protect her." It appealed to me. So I just started putting on these little streams. Natasha's a League of Legends player mostly. Her eyes light up when she talks about it. It's a multiplayer battle game played on the computer. Two teams of five go up against each other and as you play you watch on from a bird's eye view as your characters jump around swinging swords and casting spells.
The aim of the game, other than beating the shit out of the other team, is to destroy
something called a nexus. Basically it looks like a big crystal. Bright blue for one team,
“deep red for another. I usually played five. She has a big metal fist and she goes around punching”
people against. It's summer. Natasha's been streaming for a while now. She spends hours each day playing League, punching players with her huge metal fist. She records and uploads videos and then streams on twitch too. I streamed a guess a few times a week. Natasha's still pretty small time. She gets maybe 50 viewers on a really good night. But she's trying to be consistent and build up her following. It was like I have to start stream at a certain time because it was being treated as a job.
Today though, Natasha's in a rush. No time to sit on stream for hours. So I'm just going to make
this quick video for me to download later. Natasha's feeling pretty cute today. Her makeup is on point. She'll make a video about that and get back to her usual programming tomorrow. She turns her webcam on. Does a quick cosmetic rundown on how she's done her makeup. She clips it, uploads it, and then logs off. And then the next time Natasha logs back on. She sees that her tiny little offhand video has gone viral. Part of it doing well is because
they were kind of making fun of it. Like ha ha, it's a girl. Two thirds of twitch's audience is male. Not the most welcoming audience for makeup content. Oh woman making makeup on twitch, the audacity. I was like no, I was intentional. I promise. The next time Natasha streams, her audience hasn't just doubled. It hasn't tripled. It's gone up a hundredfold. The Lord behold, suddenly my streams getting rated by thousands of viewers. I'm like a
mix of excitement but also nervous because there's so many people. All of this new found attention is a fantastic opportunity for a budding streamer. Natasha's front can center for a whole new fanbase. But it's a double-edged sword. The general community was, you could say a bit toxic for sure. That toxicity is often wielded against young women and girls who play League of Legends. It's sad to say but it was so common to experience that from a certain
“small subset of males, our boys, I think boys is more accurate. Being a visible woman just”
made you an easy target. Still, Natasha knows this can be a springboard. It can catapult her into the next level. Makes streaming a real career, not just a hobby. Unfortunately, I didn't really get to take advantage of it, which we'll get into. Natasha's makeup video is blood in the water. And now someone dangerous has caught the scent. Vicious. I'm pretty sure that video is what drew
Him to me.
There's no warning signs on the horizon because this is all happening in summer of 2013.
“Over a year before Vicious befriends and then turns on Esther and months before Sargent Ben Finley”
is on his case. Vicious's campaign of internet terror is only just getting started. I was an earlier victim. But as we know, she definitely won't be the last. If Natasha wants to stand any chance of standing up to Vicious, strength and numbers is her only real home. She's going to need to work together with fellow streamers just like her. Figure out Vicious's tactics and put a stop to them. From Sony Music Entertainment and novel, this is You Are Next.
I'm Lee Alexander. This is episode four. League of Girls.
“As a longtime game and technology journalist, I've spent a lot of hours thinking about why people”
behave the way they do online. Why they flock to some games and reject others. But also what
communities they seek out. Online gaming has always been a land of opportunity for a lot of us,
including myself. It offers a way to build friendships, create spaces where we can learn and share, where we can play, collaborate, and escape reality for a moment. But lurking in gaming's darkest corners are people who play by their own rules. They don't care what damage they cause or who they hurt. Shielded in a cloak of anonymity, they can act out their worst, most insidious fantasies of control and coercion.
Often, it's fueled by their own sense of powerlessness and a desperate need to be noticed by the very
“same people they're intent on destroying. I wonder if that's what happened with Vicious.”
If he really is the vision of himself, he sold to Esther, a depressed, unimportant nerd with a shitty home life and few friends and a burning need to cast a long dark shadow over any female gamer he manages to trap in his orbit. I would run around at like three years all of it. I want a pewter, I want a pewter because I really wanted a computer to play games. By the time she's old enough to actually say the word computer, Natasha gets her wish. All right, that's surprisingly
with this custom made one for my birthday. We had one of his co-workers build me a computer. Those see-through with all these lights. It was really cool. Natasha's 13 when her dad gets her the custom computer and she spends a pretty large part of her remaining teenage years sat in front of
it. Around 20 or 21 is when she first gets into League of Legends and she really gets into it.
I made a lot of friends and I joined like Skype groups are these online forums like this one place called League of Girls because I wanted to play with other women because they were harder to find. League of Legends is one of the most popular, most influential PC games of all time, millions of people play it every month. But like a lot of mainstream online games it also has kind of a mixed reputation. There's a lot of great parts of it, but the community has a toxicity issue for
everyone. Natasha mostly tries to seek out and form teams with other girls when she does play with guys the toxic behavior tends to ramp up. There'd be like people who would like on your own team
would purposely try to lose the game by following you around. They would basically hold you back
and make it impossible for you to play the game and they would call you names the whole time. Riot games, the company behind League of Legends, are trying a few different tactics to discourage abuse in game. They introduce a reward system that encourages fair play. It's called honor, but often it's left to the players to self-police. We had this tribunal where you could
Get involved in punished bad players and judge the community almost helped re...
Now there's a new player emerging from the shadows. More dangerous than anyone, Natasha or her
friends has dealt with before. Vicious. It's summer 2013, Natasha is about 20. Fresh off of her surprise viral videos she's trying to capitalize on the publicity. She logs on to her computer and starts streaming. Within a couple of minutes my stream would just go down. And then you try to go up again and then you're at her now. We'll go down and I would be so confused. Natasha doesn't realize it at this moment, but what's
happening to her isn't just a bad connection. It's deliberate. It's something called a dedos.
The Nile of Service Attack. They send a bunch of information really quickly at your router essentially
and make it impossible for you to have it or not. Remember, this is 2013. Vicious is only just getting started on his campaign of internet terror. His reputation isn't proceeding him yet.
“I honestly didn't know that much about him. But then Natasha starts hearing things through the”
gamer grapevine. Practically all of her friends are also being dedozed. We want to share what was going on. And then eventually you get a message from this guy, bragging that he was the one responsible. At this point they only know him on social media by his username. We were all streaming so he was simultaneously watching all our streams to look for information of something he could exploit.
He would first try to do something to get your attention. D-d-u for a long time.
Next, the messages start pouring in. He would usually use twitch messaging and that was a way he harassed us. He used Twitter a lot to reach out to me but he used everything, though. Like any anyway, he could. He would reach you. Soon, Vicious graduates from the DMs and the D-d also
“attacks. He starts hacking into Natasha and her friends accounts. He would actually hack into”
people's Skype through social engineering where he would call Skype. Vicious pretends that the accounts are his that he's locked out and needs access. He calls over and over again. If one Skype employee doesn't give him what he wants, he calls another. Convencings Skype to give you over your premium Skype account. I mean, which he took from me and then he would change the information and then you would call and they'd be like,
"Sorry, your information's right. I'm like, yeah, because he just changed it." The problem was we were all connected. So if he had one girl's Skype, he had all of our Skype's. Vicious's behavior is rapidly escalating. It's not long before he starts doxing Natasha, publicly posting private information about her. Any kind of information you would give out on your stream or your profile. He would take it,
run it through Google and he'd run it through Facebook. Oh, if you could find your Facebook, he could find where you would do school. And then eventually, he could throw a lot of people, find even their address or their phone number or their email.
“I remember I'm posting my PayPal balance at one point online.”
He could let you know, "Oh, I know where you live," and then he would reach out with a message through a Twitter DM, something, a Skype DM if he had hacked someone else's Skype and commessage you. And where the messages themselves ever abusive or was it the threat of I can find you, I can reach you. It was mainly the threat of you better do what I want or this is going to get worse. Here's just after a power and attention he wanted, you'd feel helpless and for him to feel completely
powerful. All the while, whenever Natasha or any of her friends try to stream, Vicious's there with another dedos attack, stopping them from being able to broadcast and from building up their following. He wanted to make sure that you didn't succeed. The League players are constantly checking in on each other, sharing the latest about what's
happening to them, sending support and advice. They would message me or I would message them to make sure they're okay, then Natasha gets another message this time from Vicious.
.
Wow, and that's just a bit...
The match is almost automatic.
“It's so exciting to hear your words, and it's so exciting to hear your words.”
The last thing Natasha wants to do is give Vicious even a millisecond of her time. I really just want this to go away so I can continue streaming. I just wanted it to go away. I just didn't want to have anything to do with it. But she also doesn't see any other choice. She and her friends are totally under siege. I had decent viewership, and I really enjoyed it, and I was unable to capitalize them.
If you can't monetize or you can't build your community, because anytime you get more than a certain amount of viewers you're attacked, then you can't really grow or succeed in the scene. I want us to be able to do our jobs. Natasha reluctantly agrees.
“I did talk to him just so my other teammates could play.”
That was kind of just in the management mode, which I tend to do, and those kind of situations like just get through this, figure out later. Natasha gets on a Skype call with Vicious. She can't see his face. He keeps it hidden, but she can hear his voice. And now that she can hear him talking for real, she can get the measure of him.
Can I curse? I thought he was an asshole. I thought he was an asshole. He would talk about my other teammates. He would badmouth them. If Natasha has to be on this call with him, she can at least make it worth her while. She starts mining Vicious for information.
Whatever details she can share with her friends, her League of Legends teammates, so they can protect themselves from his next attack.
“I was stuck talking to him anyway, so what else am I going to talk about?”
I just asked them basic questions. I was like, "How did you get our IP? How are you getting all the information? How are you doing all this?" He just was very happy to explain it. More than happy to flaunt how smart he was. I don't know how to put other than he's just like peacocking. Did he speak to you about his other targets?
Yes, he did. He was sharing his screen. He had an actual file, he would make text file. He would just store it like you have your victims name and he would store the information he needed to harass them. Showing how he could hurt other people, showing how much power what he could accomplish. It's part of like a control harassment campaign.
Very aggressive and sociopathic. To Natasha, it feels like vicious is everywhere she turns. I use the word stalker because it was someone who quite literally stalked you, right?
He kept all your information in a file. He always kept up what you were up to.
You didn't know that person and when you told this person, you didn't want to have contact with him. He would still pursue you and your consent and your boundaries didn't matter. And he wanted to have direct access to you whenever he wanted, regardless of how you felt about it. I felt very exposed because the internet has your information widely available to anyone who is willing to take the time to find it.
And vicious is more than willing to take the time. He shows Natasha name after name, all the information he's compiled on other women and girls. His target list includes a lot of up-and-coming streamers like Natasha, but it also includes some more established names. If you became too popular in the gaming space or you became too visible,
that would definitely attract him to you really quickly.
Another thing he showed me that he was like part of this chat room basically,
Where there were a few other self-proclaimed hackers as they would call thems...
These self-proclaimed hackers share a lot of the toxic misogynist views running right through
League of Legends and other online games like it, which isn't surprising to Natasha. Unfortunately, she's used to it by now. But what is surprising is these hackers level of dedication to their fucked-up cause. Their whole goal, like their stated goal of that chat room, was to bully in target women. This is where mine and Natasha's experiences unfortunately converge.
“So I rarely like to revisit this topic, but I think it's time.”
Let's talk about gamer gate. Most people associate the beginning of gamer gate with an online post made by a bitter ex-boyfriend. He claimed his video gamemaker ex named Zoe Quinn, cheated on him with a journalist, who then gave Zoe's game a positive review.
Never mind that the accusation was completely untrue.
This post started off in a eruption about how the whole gaming industry was supposedly rigged to promote the work of women and minorities and deprioritize the needs of white men. A coordinated online mob formed, full of what I describe as alpha nerds. They didn't actually care about game journalism. They were looking for an excuse to express their misogyny. I was a freelance journalist at this point covering the video games industry.
“I wrote an article in Defense of Zoe, really in defense of all women and marginalized people”
carving out their rightful space in the gaming world. And in response, the mob turned on me too. Thousands of messages started pouring into my employer or to anywhere that had invited me to speak, telling them to fire me, demanding advertisers pull their funding. Even more threatening and abusive messages made their way to my social media and my email accounts.
One comment on an Instagram post I made, it was just like a picture of me in my neighborhood, said, "She doesn't even live that far from me. I could find out where she lives and put a screwdriver in her eye." All of this was designed to discredit me in public and scare me in private. In the end, I basically felt finished with game industry journalism. It wasn't worth it to me anymore. But despite the toxicity, Natasha doesn't want to walk away. She refuses to give up her ambitions
as a streamer, even with a target on her back. The thing was, you always knew he could come back
at any time, so it's not like you felt safe. Vicious is escalating his campaign of harassment against Natasha and her friends. They're overwhelmed, putting out every fire that Vicious is gleefully setting and they're tired of being burned. So, Vicious better watch out because he's pissing off an army. Café in his best form, with the new Cuba One capsule machine from Chibu.
In every Cuba capsule, you'll find out from special devices. For espresso, coffee cream or coffee cream, you'll find out. The new Cuba One shows with premium design, compact and large and small 1st price at 29 euros. Thanks to innovative press brutality, everyone has special aromatics with additional cream. And there's the Cuba capsule machine
in your Chibu fjale and on Chibu.de. A perfect following today. Sonne, park, picnic, and so many polls. Shopper boutique says, "Gis-all-a-g" and "halo-frulling". Here, if you're at the end of the world through the allergy time,
as a new customer spends 10% on 35 euros per day, with the code "910". To us, an e-rezette, a workshop of boutique at brontaladen and direct ein lösen. Good-chain-bedingering of Shop-minus-a- boutique.com/good-chain. By 2014, would you say he was like known to the league community
like how aware were other players of this issue?
“I think, among, especially women, he was well-known.”
By this point, vicious is causing so much damage in the league of legends community and beyond that he's making enemies everywhere. People start doxing him, posting his personal information on different forums.
It's the same post that Sergeant Ben Finley would eventually come across
revealing vicious as a Canadian teenager.
Whenever a post about him goes up, the streamer shared around with each other. The only reason we ever found out information was because of these other girls in their efforts.
“And I think because he had escalated with them to swatting,”
the swatting is when the general knowledge started being known. A lot of streamers have Amazon wish lists linked to their twitch accounts. Things subscribers can buy for them. One streamer who will call Stephanie was too frightened to talk to us on tape but did talk to my production team on background.
Stephanie figures out that vicious is using those Amazon details to track down the home addresses of streamers. She tells people to close their accounts or to use a PO box. Stephanie also warns others that vicious is able to get hold of passwords through hacking recovery emails. She tells people to change their passwords every two weeks
and not to use the same password across multiple accounts.
“Fishess is under more and more scrutiny from female streamers”
who are banding together to share information about him and strategies for fighting back. But he's showing no signs of stopping. In January 2014 alone, he calls in a bomb threat at a university on the outskirts of Vancouver and tries to swat a streamer from Toronto. He de-dosses another streamer and says he'll stop if she sends him a photo of herself.
He calls her parents too and while her dad is on the phone, fishess threatens to rape his daughter. He zeros in on one streamer and starts calling her home every night and calling her cell phone as much as 20 times a day.
But he's always gotten Natasha in his sights too.
When he would decide to reach out to me, it was unrelenting. It was a lot at once. Endless messages across Twitter, across Twitch, more and more D-doss attacks. I was streaming and I heard my mom call from the bottom of the stairs. Did you order a pizza and I'm like, "What the heck? No."
Of course, that's when he reaches out and is like, "Oh, did you enjoy the pizza?"
“What does it feel like when you know that this person has your home address?”
It was pretty scary because, at this point, you were actually possibly putting your family in friends in the crossfire. It wasn't just you anymore, right? I was very aware that it was a possibility that I could get swatted, so I even called the local Sheriff's Department.
The lady answered the phone and I tried to explain to her what was happening. That I was an online personality and I was trying to explain to her like, "Hey, please be aware of this. This is a guy who knows where I live, who has actually sit cops to other people's houses." And I just want you guys to be aware of that in case of false call comes in.
They made me feel really small and silly and like I was stupid basically.
She just like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, whatever. I can't help you. Just move on." No matter where I turned, I was just met with like, "What are you talking about?" The only place Natasha gets any understanding and any support is from the other streamers being harassed. Like her, they're raising the alarm, warning about what vicious is up to, figuring out how they can protect themselves and each other.
I changed my Skype name to sound like I was a boy and I was able to stay under the radar from him for a bit. I had to learn how to change our IP address, but it seems like vicious can still find and target Natasha and her friends whenever he wants. The problem was, as long as he had our Skype, if one of our teammates logged in the Skype, it would instantly give him our new IP address. To Natasha, her local police don't seem to be able, or even willing to stop him.
She's been fighting for so long to protect herself and her fellow streamers. It's reaching a point where she doesn't know how much fight she has left, where she even wants to stream anymore. It may need to give it up pretty much entirely. Like, it took a lot of the fun out of it. It was so exhausting. It was so exhausting. You had to spend so much mental effort
and just dealing with awful things that most people don't ever have to deal with. Yeah, and it really, it takes a toll. You become tired and then you don't get to participate
In the way that everyone else gets to participate.
because so much of your sort of headspace is being taken up by putting out those fires. I totally relate to what you're saying.
“I lost my personality. I mean, I can see from my earlier streams to my later streams.”
I just became a different person. I was not as fun. It was not as perky. It was not as happy. I was miserable. You know, he definitely hurt my mental health and my career.
I finally reached like a breaking point. He would threaten things like, well, if you leave,
you know, I'll do this or what if I do that? I was like, go ahead. I have nothing to live for. There's literally nothing you can do to me. I didn't hear from him again after that. On the next episode of You Are Next. He would start cycling through victims.
“Victims like Eva. If you want to derune your life, he really could.”
The motivation for him to do these things is to feel like he's power over these women. But Eva is about to take the power back with an audacious undercover mission. It was a big risk that I can stop him and the tide might finally be starting to turn as Sergeant Ben Finley finds a powerful new ally in his fight.
That was the game-changing moment. Once we got started, Sergeant Finley and I never gave up. We never stopped.
[Music]
“Don't want to wait for the next episode. You don't have to.”
Unlock all episodes of You Are Next, early and ad-free. Right now by subscribing to the Benj Podcast channel. Search for the binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen.
As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month.
Check out the binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to learn more. This is You Are Next, an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and novel, hosted by me, Lea Alexander. Lea Meyer is our senior producer. Verity de Cala is our assistant producer. Sandra Schmuelli 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 Schurlevin at Miller Coresenic Raymond LLP and to Ford Collier, who performed the woodwind for our theme music. And a big thanks to the whole Sony Music Entertainment team.
Three decades ago, a young woman named Angie Dodge is found brutally murdered in Idaho Falls. Police put a man behind bars, but as the years passed, doubts emerge about whether the real killer was ever caught. That's when Angie's own mother and barks on a decades-long mission to uncover the truth. Listen to the snare, a new series from ABC Audio. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
