Speaker 1: A quick note, this is episode three of a six
Speaker 1: part series. If you haven't heard the prior episodes, we
Speaker 1: recommend going back and starting there. It should also be
Speaker 1: noted that this series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence.
Speaker 1: Please take care when listening.
Speaker 2: With Late.
Speaker 1: One night, after a day of reporting in Leavittown, I
Speaker 1: called Margie from my drive home and she told me
Speaker 1: she'd turned up something big.
Speaker 2: I told Olivia I'd found some people who were looking
Speaker 2: into the same website where the Lavettankas had appeared. They
Speaker 2: were halfway across the world in New Zealand.
Speaker 1: I was like, what, in my many years of covering
Speaker 1: tech for Bloomberg, I've had very few stories take me
Speaker 1: back home to me, New Zealand is a little slah
Speaker 1: of paradise at the bottom of the world, a place
Speaker 1: where traffic jams and missing dogs make the nightly news.
Speaker 1: Now Margie was telling me that women in New Zealand
Speaker 1: were also being harassed on the very same website where
Speaker 1: the Livettown girls were posted, and in New Zealand the
Speaker 1: local cops were taking notice.
Speaker 3: So my name is Doug preferred Doug, but Douglas.
Speaker 2: Nuoku one of my sources introduced me to Doug, who's
Speaker 2: in his early fifties, tall, shaved head. He's a detective
Speaker 2: in New Zealand, stationed at the top of the South
Speaker 2: Island in a small town called Blenham.
Speaker 3: No traffic lights in Blenham, no traffic jams, no congestion
Speaker 3: of people or commercial buildings.
Speaker 2: So is it I'm just imagining less I'm there, not necessarily.
Speaker 2: Doug is brusque and no nonsense. He looks like he
Speaker 2: was born to play the role of coop, and in
Speaker 2: fact he sort.
Speaker 4: Of was, so I'll put it out there. At nine
Speaker 4: years old, my father left. Once my father left, basically
Speaker 4: our wills fell apart in terms of structure and discipline
Speaker 4: and behavior.
Speaker 3: My brothers fell hard.
Speaker 5: My brothers were into gangs and gang members, and so
Speaker 5: they fell straight into trouble, straight into prison. I went
Speaker 5: and saw them in prison once, and the first thing
Speaker 5: I said to me is, don't you ever come back here?
Speaker 4: Don't you ever come and see see? And I basically
Speaker 4: left from there and that was the end of it.
Speaker 2: But Doug went the other way into law enforcement. He's
Speaker 2: been on the police force for over twenty years now,
Speaker 2: working mostly on drug related crimes. One day in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: he got a call that changed his career.
Speaker 4: So one day a colleague of mine phoned me and said, basically,
Speaker 4: I've got this friend of mine who's been bombarded with
Speaker 4: horrific photographs for several years, images of her face taken
Speaker 4: from social media sites, and on those images there were
Speaker 4: often captions detailing how pretty she was and what would
Speaker 4: you like to do to her in terms of sexual
Speaker 4: preferences and violations. There were also images of her face
Speaker 4: with males erect genitalia or males ejaculating on her image
Speaker 4: and then reposting it back online. She had been to
Speaker 4: another police station to make a complaint, but due to
Speaker 4: capability and understanding, they didn't.
Speaker 3: Know how to deal with it.
Speaker 4: And she's ad wits end to the point where she
Speaker 4: was potentially suicidal at one stage. Is there anything you
Speaker 4: can do?
Speaker 2: Doug hadn't seen this level of online abuse, stalking and
Speaker 2: harassment before. He needed to hear what happened firsthand.
Speaker 4: So the first time I met the victim, I was
Speaker 4: obviously at work.
Speaker 3: It was late.
Speaker 4: Typically I'd set up a nice soft interview room where
Speaker 4: he sat on a nice soft couch get a cup
Speaker 4: of tea. But I would start off, try and get
Speaker 4: to know the person, try and build a nice, easy
Speaker 4: rapport really quickly. You want to make things as easy
Speaker 4: as possible. She was pretty apprehensive. What was a physical
Speaker 4: toll as well as a mental toll? And you could
Speaker 4: see it in your face and she was talking to me.
Speaker 2: The woman who was not willing to be interviewed and
Speaker 2: will remain anonymous in our series recounted how her email
Speaker 2: inbox was constantly flooded with explicit pictures and violent threats.
Speaker 4: She was able to provide some screenshots and information about
Speaker 4: what's been going on.
Speaker 2: Every time she got these messages, she'd block the center
Speaker 2: and take a screenshot, and she'd add it to her
Speaker 2: growing pile of digital a evidence. Had you seen anything
Speaker 2: like that before?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: What went through your mind when she showed you those pictures?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm a hunter.
Speaker 4: You have certain police officers there that will wait for
Speaker 4: calls that come in and then now go and respond
Speaker 4: to those courts. I like to identify myself as a
Speaker 4: person that will go and hunt people before they get
Speaker 4: a chance to do that sort of thing. So, as
Speaker 4: a hunter, if you're given pray, you want to go
Speaker 4: and get it.
Speaker 2: From iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Levertown, I'm Margie.
Speaker 1: Murphy and I'm Olivia Carvill.
Speaker 2: Doug sifted through image after image, email after email, attempting
Speaker 2: to trace the sender. There were so many emails and
Speaker 2: they were sent from different addresses, making it hard to
Speaker 2: identify the sender. Many of the messages were also attempting
Speaker 2: to get her to click on links to pawn websites.
Speaker 2: Doug wondered if the sender had posted these explicit images online,
Speaker 2: which is a crime in New Zealand. So, in addition
Speaker 2: to the threats of blackmail that the person was sending,
Speaker 2: if these images were disseminated online, and if Doug could
Speaker 2: catch that person, it would mean years in prison.
Speaker 4: Although I'm a hunter, I'm still bound by rules, by laws,
Speaker 4: and by a line that I cannot cross. The reason
Speaker 4: why Will got involved was because there were lines that
Speaker 4: needed to be crossed.
Speaker 2: Doug had heard about Will from another officer who said
Speaker 2: Will was known for doing whatever had to be done
Speaker 2: to solve tricky cases like these.
Speaker 4: He is like a little terrier, so as soon as
Speaker 4: he gets a rope to pull on I'll pull until
Speaker 4: he gets the whole rope.
Speaker 3: He would go to extremes.
Speaker 6: My name is Will Wallace. I am thirty seven years old,
Speaker 6: live in New Zealand. I have a young family.
Speaker 2: Well, there's really nothing like a little terrier, and he's
Speaker 2: much more comfortable behind the computer in that space.
Speaker 6: I found it a lot easier just to be a nobody,
Speaker 6: you know, not worry about all the other stuff that
Speaker 6: kind of comes along with it, you know, this whole
Speaker 6: podcast being one of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Will grew up on the South Island. He served in
Speaker 2: New Zealand's military and as a police officer. He then
Speaker 2: became a private investigator, which is when Doug caught him
Speaker 2: and told him about this woman who was the target
Speaker 2: of an online abuse campaign.
Speaker 6: To be perfectly honest, I was given very little in
Speaker 6: terms of information. I was basically just given internet harassment.
Speaker 6: It's been happening for three or four years. The victim
Speaker 6: is at their wets end. Would you be interested in
Speaker 6: having a look. So I was like a moth to
Speaker 6: a flame.
Speaker 2: First, he reviewed the evidence the victim gave him, essentially
Speaker 2: a giant pdaff of abusive pictures and comments. The victim
Speaker 2: had received all this by email, but Will suspected the
Speaker 2: content also lived somewhere else.
Speaker 6: I was like, well, there's got to be a website
Speaker 6: or there's got to be somewhere where the images are
Speaker 6: being posted. So I was like, the first step is
Speaker 6: to find out where the photos are being posted.
Speaker 2: And that's when he found it with a simple reverse
Speaker 2: image search.
Speaker 6: This website come on Printed Picks.
Speaker 2: The very same website where the Levett Town girls had
Speaker 2: found their images altered, posted and defiled.
Speaker 6: The first time I saw up, it's kind of like
Speaker 6: disbelief that our website like that exists on the Internet.
Speaker 6: It's like an online so right. So yeah, seeing it
Speaker 6: in front of me, I just site, what the fuck
Speaker 6: is this place? It's you can tell by the photos
Speaker 6: on there that the people on there have not consented
Speaker 6: to being on there in the first place. I would
Speaker 6: describe it as more of a severe Internet harassment site
Speaker 6: than a pornography website.
Speaker 2: To figure out how many users were going after the victim,
Speaker 2: will have to wade through every single post made about her.
Speaker 2: Only then could he figure out who was going after
Speaker 2: her the most. Once he did that, he was able
Speaker 2: to determine who was organizing the harassment, coordinating it, and
Speaker 2: goading others to join in.
Speaker 6: So if you can imagine this has been happening over
Speaker 6: like a period of three or four years, then there
Speaker 6: is a lot of content that that person has posted.
Speaker 2: The question remained, who is this person? That's where having
Speaker 2: a civilian like Will involved in the investigation helped. As
Speaker 2: a private citizen, he could move through the web freely
Speaker 2: and even pay for information he wanted on the dark Web,
Speaker 2: and Will knew how to do this with tools he'd
Speaker 2: first used as a police officer tracking drug dealers online.
Speaker 3: The Facebook graph tool.
Speaker 6: You could pretty much punch anyone's Facebook profile into and
Speaker 6: export a lot more information than they would otherwise be
Speaker 6: willing to show, like via interaction with other people's photos,
Speaker 6: all of their comments, all of their photos, the groups
Speaker 6: they were in.
Speaker 2: There's a name for this, it's called open source intelligence,
Speaker 2: and as well explained, it's basically.
Speaker 6: Hoovering up information all over the place, generally the Internet,
Speaker 6: and then turning it into a product that can be actioned.
Speaker 2: This is the kind of thing that takes a lot
Speaker 2: of skill and a lot of time, but Will was
Speaker 2: good at it. After months of digging, Will started following
Speaker 2: the harasser from pseudonym to pseudonym, finding accounts he owned
Speaker 2: on different social media platforms, and Will discovered something else.
Speaker 2: Like in Levittown, this one harasser had many victims.
Speaker 1: As Will Wallace followed the suspected harasser around the internet,
Speaker 1: he found other victims, including a young woman named Lucy,
Speaker 1: who had been harassed for more than half a decade,
Speaker 1: starting when she lived not far from the first victim.
Speaker 7: I'm really still trying to untangle in my adult life
Speaker 7: how it has affected certain things that happened to me.
Speaker 8: Lady as of high school.
Speaker 1: The first time Lucy was harassed online in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: she was going to an all girls high school, similar
Speaker 1: to the school I went to when I was growing
Speaker 1: up in New Zealand. All girls' schools are the norm.
Speaker 1: We wore a uniform every day. We even had a
Speaker 1: special cream colored outfit just for church. Lucy also had
Speaker 1: to wear a uniform.
Speaker 7: We were fed talking points like being only surrounded by
Speaker 7: other girls is better for your academic standard because you're
Speaker 7: not distracted by boys, and we were just trained to
Speaker 7: be good girls. I think it reiterated that we were
Speaker 7: lesser than boys, so we were constantly, constantly thinking of
Speaker 7: how to appear more attractive or more cool to the boys.
Speaker 1: As Lucy learned, whether it's in Livettown, Long Island or
Speaker 1: or a beach town in New Zealand, just identifying as
Speaker 1: a girl online can make you a target, and in
Speaker 1: Lucy's case, she learned she was a target from some
Speaker 1: friends who saw her face on the dating app Tinder.
Speaker 7: I was under the age of eighteen, so I could
Speaker 7: not have a tender, but it's some guys that I
Speaker 7: knew who were maybe one or two years older than
Speaker 7: me sent me screenshots of a tender account with all
Speaker 7: of my photos on it and were asking if it
Speaker 7: was me.
Speaker 1: The photos had been taken from her Instagram account. Some
Speaker 1: of them featured her in her high school uniform. At first,
Speaker 1: Lucy thought that was kind of funny, maybe a joke,
Speaker 1: but then she learned that there was more to it.
Speaker 7: When this person matched with a boy on Tinder, they
Speaker 7: would send them a Snapchat account, and through that Snapchat
Speaker 7: account would send like very explicit nude and sexual content,
Speaker 7: but without a face.
Speaker 1: The photos that were sent back weren't altered images of Lucy.
Speaker 1: They were nude photos that were cropped so you couldn't
Speaker 1: see a face, but whoever had created the fake account
Speaker 1: clearly wanted to make it look like Lucy was sending
Speaker 1: back nude and sexual content. She decided she would report
Speaker 1: it to the police in Nelson, her hometown in New Zealand.
Speaker 7: I went after school one day in my school uniform
Speaker 7: to the police station and I knocked on the little
Speaker 7: window thingy and a middle aged man came out, and
Speaker 7: I said I maybe needed some help. But as soon
Speaker 7: as he stepped up to the window, I remember getting
Speaker 7: really nervous and suddenly feeling so silly, because it's actually
Speaker 7: rather public when you go to the police you have
Speaker 7: to kind of plead your case in the waiting room,
Speaker 7: which is quite echoe loud. So this random middle aged
Speaker 7: man police officer come up to the window and asked
Speaker 7: me what was wrong, and I kind of feebly told
Speaker 7: him that I think someone had stolen my pictures and
Speaker 7: was faking my identity on Tinder, and he just stared
Speaker 7: at me blankly.
Speaker 1: She said she felt so weird being in this public
Speaker 1: space trying to explain this bizarre, upsetting and deeply personal
Speaker 1: situation to this man who was completely clueless.
Speaker 7: And he he just had no idea what I was
Speaker 7: talking about. I remember him just saying, oh, Snapchat, what's that?
Speaker 8: He just he had really no idea what I was
Speaker 8: talking about.
Speaker 1: To be fear, this was around twenty fifteen. Snapchat and
Speaker 1: Tinder were only three or four years old.
Speaker 7: I think I just went in with confidence out a ten,
Speaker 7: and every minute that I was in the waiting room,
Speaker 7: it just depleted by one point by the time he
Speaker 7: stared at me blankly and then realizing that this was
Speaker 7: you know, other people could hear me speaking, and then
Speaker 7: I got quieter, and then I got embarrassed, and then
Speaker 7: you know, I just didn't have anything left to give
Speaker 7: after a few minutes, so.
Speaker 8: I just apologized for wasting his time, and I left.
Speaker 2: Like the women in Levittown, Lucy tried to put the
Speaker 2: pictures and the police visit to the back of her mind.
Speaker 2: She moved on with her life, graduated from high school,
Speaker 2: but the next year, twenty sixteen, she started receiving messages.
Speaker 7: I am not quite sure how it began, but it
Speaker 7: began at some point that year that I started receiving
Speaker 7: quite a number of message requests from anonymous profiles, either
Speaker 7: on Facebook, Messenger or via Instagram, Oh of some disturbing content.
Speaker 2: The messages began as verbal abuse and threats of violence.
Speaker 8: And other times there was photos.
Speaker 2: And then there was an onscourt of a different.
Speaker 7: Abuse, somebody holding their penis over printed out photos.
Speaker 2: Of me, one after the other after the other, so
Speaker 2: many that at some point Lucy stopped counting.
Speaker 7: Many a different photos strewn across the cavet or on
Speaker 7: a bed.
Speaker 2: At that point, it wasn't clear to Lucy whether this
Speaker 2: was illegal. She figured it was something that she just
Speaker 2: had to deal with.
Speaker 7: It sounds crazy, but I have received so so many
Speaker 7: photos of penises over pictures of me over five years.
Speaker 7: I cannot remember how it feels to be shocked by it.
Speaker 7: I have received more than I cared to remember. I
Speaker 7: have become so accustomed to that image. I cannot even
Speaker 7: remember being shocked by it. And I'm sorry to say
Speaker 7: that just seems like same shit, different day now.
Speaker 2: As soon as she saw the messages, she blocked the
Speaker 2: center and deleted the content. Ping block delete, ping block delete,
Speaker 2: ping block delete. It became the constant humming in the
Speaker 2: background of her life. By this time, she had moved
Speaker 2: to Europe and had begun studying to become a social scientist,
Speaker 2: and still she had to deal with the dread of
Speaker 2: this cyber abuse.
Speaker 7: From twenty eighteen, I had been living in Europe for
Speaker 7: about a year and a half and some of the
Speaker 7: harassment had slowed down, like it was just a sort
Speaker 7: of small hangover and remnant from high school. But unfortunately
Speaker 7: my dad got very sick, so I had to return
Speaker 7: to New Zealand, and almost as soon as I got back,
Speaker 7: I started receiving these messages again, but now they were
Speaker 7: more pointed.
Speaker 2: This time, someone had threatened to contact her parents and
Speaker 2: send graphic photos if she didn't respond to them in
Speaker 2: a certain number of days.
Speaker 7: They also had my parents' email addresses already in the
Speaker 7: email address bar, to prove to me that they knew
Speaker 7: who my parents were and where they worked. The idea
Speaker 7: that just someone out there was obsessed with hurting me
Speaker 7: definitely began to take off my life. I remember being
Speaker 7: really scared to go out.
Speaker 8: At night on my own.
Speaker 7: I was terrified of ever sleeping somewhere where you could
Speaker 7: see from the outside in because I always had this
Speaker 7: vision that someone following me at night and would would
Speaker 7: look into my room. It was unbelievable how much the
Speaker 7: fear consumed me. I felt sometimes overcome with suspicion, and
Speaker 7: it really undermined a lot of relationships I had with
Speaker 7: men or people that were in the life of my mom,
Speaker 7: or men that were in the life of my friends.
Speaker 7: I yeah, I just always had in the back of
Speaker 7: my mind that any of them could be the one.
Speaker 2: Lucy decided she would try to go to the police again.
Speaker 7: At this point, I felt, now I'm an adult, so like,
Speaker 7: they're definitely gonna take me seriously.
Speaker 8: I'm not wearing my skool uniform this time.
Speaker 7: I am a very old twenty year old and I
Speaker 7: walked in. It was when I remember, so it was
Speaker 7: cold and dark already, at like six pm, and I
Speaker 7: said I would like to speak to someone because I'm
Speaker 7: being harassed, and the exact same thing happened. Despite my
Speaker 7: best intentions, they just had no idea what I was
Speaker 7: talking about.
Speaker 8: I remember. It was a very short interaction.
Speaker 7: And I left and sat crying in my car. I
Speaker 7: didn't have the language to express what was illegal about
Speaker 7: what was going on, and they didn't have the language
Speaker 7: or the training to understand what was significant or illegal
Speaker 7: about what was going on. So, you know, I probably
Speaker 7: said something like, Oh, I'm being bothered on Instagram or
Speaker 7: I'm receiving some unwanted content or something along those lines.
Speaker 7: But we didn't have enough, like yeah, digital literacy or
Speaker 7: social media literacy from a legal or criminal standpoint at
Speaker 7: that time to deal with these things. I feel like
Speaker 7: neither of us could communicate to each other what was important.
Speaker 7: I felt deeply like at that point the onus was
Speaker 7: on me to prove to them why they should care,
Speaker 7: and then because I couldn't do that, I panicked and left.
Speaker 7: Two years later, she got an email in twenty twenty,
Speaker 7: I got a very unexpected email from the New Zealand
Speaker 7: Police asking to have a phone call with me. And
Speaker 7: I was so suspicious at this point of online harassment
Speaker 7: and the ability to fake anything online that my initial
Speaker 7: response was that this was my harasser pretending to be
Speaker 7: a place I was trying to get in touch with me.
Speaker 2: Lucy soon registered that this was real and that she
Speaker 2: was part of something much bigger.
Speaker 7: I realized that there was a wider case going on
Speaker 7: revolving around another woman who was being harassed in a
Speaker 7: similar way, where they were basically had reverse engineered some
Speaker 7: evidence that led them to me.
Speaker 2: In addition to Lucy, Doug Nukou and Will Wallace had
Speaker 2: identified twelve other victims in New Zealand, and they were
Speaker 2: getting closer to a perpetrator. Will had been following a
Speaker 2: suspect around the Internet for months, getting to know his
Speaker 2: favorite usernames, watching him post the same victims on different
Speaker 2: pornographic websites, and even watching him buy and sell secondhand
Speaker 2: goods on Facebook, Marketplace and elsewhere. It quickly became clear
Speaker 2: that the person who was responsible for the harassment was
Speaker 2: skilled at what he was doing, and he knew how
Speaker 2: to hide.
Speaker 4: They were using crypto accounts that were from overseas sites,
Speaker 4: for instance America, proton Email, Switzerland, European sites. It was
Speaker 4: also obviously at the time that our finder used a VPN.
Speaker 2: A VPN or a virtual private network is like wearing
Speaker 2: an invisibility cloak while you glide around the Internet. No
Speaker 2: one will know where in the world you actually are.
Speaker 2: So Will didn't know exactly where this perp lived, but
Speaker 2: he kept watching him, waiting for a chance to pick
Speaker 2: up some detail somewhere about where he lived. Will watched
Speaker 2: as the suspect brought girls underwear and bulk. Another time
Speaker 2: he saw him post an electric guitar for sale. When
Speaker 2: he looked closely, the guitar had been laid out on
Speaker 2: a floral comforter. Will realized he'd seen that comforter somewhere before,
Speaker 2: on a picture hosted to a pornographic website called ex
Speaker 2: Hamster that he'd already linked to the suspect. Doug was
Speaker 2: able to subpoena that ex Hamster account. It turned out
Speaker 2: the suspect hadn't always masked his traffic on the site.
Speaker 2: This one time he hadn't.
Speaker 4: My team found one IP address that hadn't been masked,
Speaker 4: and that was an IP address that we could attribute
Speaker 4: to a person.
Speaker 2: Once again, like in Levittown, the background of a photo
Speaker 2: sealed the deal. Will knew the matching bedspread meant they
Speaker 2: had the right guy. Now it was up to the
Speaker 2: police when we coloded on the door.
Speaker 4: I would say for personally, for myself, that was one
Speaker 4: of the most satisfying and highlighted days of my career.
Speaker 4: You can imagine Americans on the helicopters parasailing down and
Speaker 4: smashing through windows.
Speaker 3: That's what I wanted.
Speaker 4: Box wouldn't give me that, So the next best thing
Speaker 4: I was kicking in the sky's door and exposing him
Speaker 4: was a highlight.
Speaker 3: I've not had a better day in the place, honestly.
Speaker 2: His name is Finn Cotton. He lived in Nelson, the
Speaker 2: same town Loosey's from. I remember the distinct sensation of
Speaker 2: time slowing down, and then they just said a name.
Speaker 7: And I don't know what I expected, but they said
Speaker 7: a name that was very familiar to me.
Speaker 8: It was the name of a.
Speaker 7: Boy that I went to school with when I was twelve,
Speaker 7: and it just suddenly felt all.
Speaker 2: She knew Finn when they were kids, but hadn't seen
Speaker 2: him since she went to high school.
Speaker 7: I felt such a wave of relief that it was
Speaker 7: a person, because I guess when someone lives in an anonymity,
Speaker 7: you think they're a monster, and when you hear a name,
Speaker 7: there suddenly just a person.
Speaker 2: But she also said it's scary that someone she barely
Speaker 2: knew could launch such a vicious, years long campaign against her.
Speaker 2: In October twenty twenty four, Finn pleaded guilty to blackmail,
Speaker 2: causing harm by posting digital communication and possession of child
Speaker 2: sexual abuse materials. His online abuse campaign lasted nearly a decade,
Speaker 2: and he targeted over a dozen people. What would you
Speaker 2: do or say to Finn if you saw him again?
Speaker 8: What would I say to Finn?
Speaker 9: Ah?
Speaker 8: Such a good question.
Speaker 7: Oh it's so bad, but I just want to ask
Speaker 7: it you. Okay, this is so much anger coming from him.
Speaker 8: It's just.
Speaker 7: Someone has to be so hurt and so angry too.
Speaker 7: I want to hurt other people in this way because
Speaker 7: I guess even though even though he's done horrible things
Speaker 7: to me, we are from the same place. And it's
Speaker 7: not that I don't think he has to answer to
Speaker 7: what he's done, but I feel that this is someone
Speaker 7: who's been failed. I see so much anger towards women,
Speaker 7: and that frustrates me and makes me so angry that,
Speaker 7: you know, a young man can feel so entitled, so
Speaker 7: so entitled to women's affection and attention.
Speaker 8: And now there's you know, a queue of.
Speaker 9: Equally angry professional men in police uniforms or in h
Speaker 9: you know, lawyers offices willing to bring down the full
Speaker 9: force of the law on him.
Speaker 8: And what is going to come of this. He's going
Speaker 8: to go to prison, then what.
Speaker 2: We have attempted to reach Finncotton for comment but haven't
Speaker 2: heard back. In November twenty twenty four, he was sentenced
Speaker 2: to seven years behind bars. As for Will, he's been
Speaker 2: changed by the cases too, but in a different way.
Speaker 2: He desperately wanted someone to go after what he believes
Speaker 2: is the root of the problem. A website where so
Speaker 2: many perpetrators he was helping to catch was still posting.
Speaker 6: At the top of the website, on the left hand side,
Speaker 6: there is a cartoon picture of a girl who looks underage.
Speaker 6: There is a scroll bar that scrolls from sort of
Speaker 6: right to lift and it shows the most recently updated topics.
Speaker 6: I think when you you see that scroll bar, that's
Speaker 6: when you get an understanding of just how vile the
Speaker 6: website is and just the type of horrible things that
Speaker 6: get put on it. And that is anything from the
Speaker 6: harassment that we've just talked about through to pictures of children,
Speaker 6: pictures of social media details addresses.
Speaker 2: And he noticed something else all over this website deep
Speaker 2: fakes images that made people look like they were naked
Speaker 2: or in sexual positions. Some images were generated to make
Speaker 2: it look like the women had been abused, covered in bruises.
Speaker 2: At first, Will thought of it as just a new
Speaker 2: mechanism of harassment.
Speaker 6: That's kind of how I viewed it, probably a little
Speaker 6: bit naive at that point, just not understanding that it's
Speaker 6: the start of a massive problem.
Speaker 2: A massive problem that would consume the next two years
Speaker 2: of will Wallace's life and bring him together with an
Speaker 2: unlikely international coalition to take aim at the site itself.
Speaker 1: At the same time, halfway across the world, law enforcement
Speaker 1: officials in Levettown, New York, were also investigating the same website.
Speaker 1: But back then in New York, there was no guidebook,
Speaker 1: no law that made posting deep fake pornography a crime.
Speaker 3: It is a crime that you look at and you say,
Speaker 3: this is awful, this should be illegal.
Speaker 7: Book, what is this?
Speaker 8: What is this crime?
Speaker 1: It was up to them to figure that out and fast.
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Speaker 1: Steve bone Our Bloomberg Editors are Caitlin Kenney and Jeff Grocop.
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