We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

“You shouldn’t do that if you have a boyfriend.”
“I know. It’s terrible…Sometimes I find a guy that’s up for it.”
“Oh. You found guys that have done stuff before?”
“Yeah.”
“Well I hope you find someone.”
“I was kinda hoping it would be you.” Pause. “I feel dumb.”
“No, don’t worry.”
“Do you send pictures normally?”
“Not really.”
“Well, if it’s not too weird maybe I could send you a picture. And if you don’t like it, that’s ok.” William then dug through his collection of
downloaded porn and found a photo of a young woman’s breasts that he figured would pass for Selena’s, based on what he could see from
her profile picture. Then he sent it over.
The goal was to get Max Lopez to send back a photo of his own genitalia. Like a charm, it worked. As soon as William sent over the
photo of breasts, Lopez promptly sent back a photo of his own penis. “They’re all desperate to be complimented on their penises,” William
said. “I don’t know why guys think girls want to see that but it works.”
“Oh my God this is so hot,” William had written back as he opened another window and posted Max’s photo in the private Facebook
group with his /b/rothers. “Everybody add Max Lopez,” he told them.
Soon Max was being bombarded with friend requests from the fifty other fake Facebook profiles. Apparently not too suspicious, Max
accepted friendship from fifteen of them. William and his /b/ cohorts went to Max’s profile page and looked for Facebook friends that had the
same last name, Lopez.
When the group thought they had identified an account that was Max’s brother, William corroborated the information with Max directly.
“Oh, I think I went to high school with your brother,” he said, still as Selena. “What’s his name again?” Max replied that it was Kevin. Now
William and the /b/rothers had mapped out Max’s immediate family. It was time to pounce.
“Don’t block me,” William suddenly said. Even in text, the tone had changed as his charade as Selena came to an end. “I have your penis
picture and I’m going to send it to all of your family if you don’t give me your Facebook password.”
Max Lopez was stunned, and soon enough, distraught. He was seventeen. He worked for his local church. This wasn’t going to look
good.
“I felt bad, but I just laughed,” William remembered. Out of desperation, Max gave his password, but William had no qualms about going
back on his deal. Once he was in Max’s account, he took the penis photo and posted it on the Facebook wall of Max’s mother, along with the
message “Hi, mom. Here’s a picture of my cock. Tell me what you think. LOL.” Other /b/rothers from William’s private Facebook group
had been given access to Max’s account too and were now posting the photo to around ten of Max’s friends and family members. The benefit
of posting from different accounts was that it was almost impossible for a person to block all of them. As others in the Facebook group took
over spamming Max’s social network with his genitalia, William moved on to other boys in Selena’s chat list and did the same thing all over
again.
It had been months since William had laughed as much as he did that night. It was “a perfect evening” that finished at around nine the next
morning. In the end, his team hacked into more than ten different Facebook accounts, all thanks to his access to Selena.
“We split up several boyfriends and girlfriends and appalled many people’s mothers,” William remembered. “That’s one of the bits I enjoy
more. Sending a picture of someone’s cock to their mum. The idea of it happening to me is so unimaginably embarrassing it makes me
laugh.”
What he loved doing even more, from the time he’d begun pedo-baiting, at fifteen, was getting another man online highly aroused and then
suddenly dousing the moment with the threat of exposure to family and friends or police. As his victim shot from one end of the emotional
spectrum to the other, William was offering him a brief glimpse into what he felt all the time. What he called a “bleach shower, a reactive
depression, a hot flush and shiver at the same time.” Hacking into people’s Facebook accounts wasn’t exactly life-altering, but he got a buzz
from knowing that at least for a moment, his victims felt their lives crumbling around them.
“I’d be lying if I said there was any great reason,” he said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms to reveal a large hole in his
sweater, near the armpit. “I don’t feel guilty, it makes me laugh and it wastes a night. That’s all I want from 4chan. I want something that’s
going to leave me not depressed and give me something to focus on. And it’s fun to make someone feel that awful from such a distance. I
could never do it face-to-face.”
William spent the next few nights keeping hold of Selena’s credentials, meeting with his new Facebook group of /b/ pranksters, and
terrorizing people on Selena’s social network, including posting comments on the photos of her female friends and calling them fat. The
mother of one of Selena’s Facebook friends, who happened to be a police officer, eventually sent harassment papers to the real Selena’s
home address. Selena, William said, was “the gift that keeps on giving.” At one point he posted a status update on Selena’s Facebook profile,
announcing to her friends that her account had been hacked but that everything was back to normal—then followed that up with another
update purporting to be from a friend, saying Selena had been hit by a drunk driver and died. This was how William liked to cause a stir. Not
by entertaining an audience of thousands on Twitter, like Topiary did, but by embarrassing others to entertain himself. Still, there were things
that William and Topiary had in common, not least that both had found Anonymous through 4chan.
Two months after hacking Selena’s account, he accepted the chance to meet Jake Davis, who was now on bail, over an organized lunch to
talk about Anonymous. It would be the first time they would talk, offline or online, and the first time either would meet another Anon face to
face and discuss the impact of Anonymous on his life.
William and Jake both bought train tickets to a nondescript town in England where they would meet. Though Jake would learn William’s
real first name and see him face to face, he would not ask for any other identifying information and would never know his full name. The
morning of their meeting, William’s train snaked through the countryside, past green and beige fields, dawdling sheep, and brown rivers that