Pod Insights The Binge Cases: Doctor Billions U R NEXT | 4. League of Girls About this episode Streamers like Natasha have had enough of playing defense. Now they’re starting to band together and fight back.
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
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0:55 Speaker 01 The Binge.
1:01 Speaker 02 Someone basically said you should start streaming, and I was like, sure.
1:06 Speaker 01 This is Natasha. That's not her real name. We've changed it to try to protect her.
1:11 Speaker 02 It appealed to me. So I just started putting on these little streams.
1:19 Speaker 01 Natasha's a League of Legends player mostly. Her eyes light up when she talks about it.
1:27 Speaker 01 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.
1:45 Speaker 01 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.
1:57 Speaker 02 I usually play Vi. She has a big metal fist, and she goes around punching people, I guess.
2:10 Speaker 01 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.
2:24 Speaker 02 I've streamed, I guess, a few times a week.
2:27 Speaker 01 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.
2:35 Speaker 02 It was like, I have to start a stream at a certain time because it was being treated as a job.
2:42 Speaker 01 Today, though, Natasha's in a rush. No time to sit on stream for hours.
2:47 Speaker 02 So I'm just gonna make this quick video for me to download later.
2:52 Speaker 01 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.
3:18 Speaker 02 Part of it doing well was because they were kind of making fun of it, like, "Ha ha, it's a girl."
3:23 Speaker 01 Two-thirds of Twitch's audience is male. Not the most welcoming audience for makeup content.
3:29 Speaker 02 Oh, a woman making makeup on Twitch? The audacity! I was like, "No." This wasn't intentional, I promise.
3:39 Speaker 01 The next time Natasha streams, her audience hasn't just doubled. It hasn't tripled. It's gone up a hundredfold.
3:47 Speaker 02 Low and behold, suddenly, my stream's getting raided by thousands of viewers. I'm like, a mix of excitement, but also nervous, because there's so many people.
3:58 Speaker 01 All of this newfound attention is a fantastic opportunity for a budding streamer. Natasha's front and center for a whole new fanbase. But it's a double-edged sword.
4:11 Speaker 02 The general community was, you could say, a bit toxic, for sure.
4:19 Speaker 01 That toxicity is often wielded against young women and girls who play League of Legends.
4:25 Speaker 02 It's sad to say, but it was so common to experience that from a certain small subset of males. Or boys. I think "boys" is more accurate. Being a visible woman just made you an easy target.
4:41 Speaker 01 Still, Natasha knows this can be a springboard. It can catapult her into the next level, make streaming a real career, not just a hobby.
4:51 Speaker 02 Unfortunately, I didn't really get to take advantage of it, which we'll get into.
4:57 Speaker 01 Natasha's makeup video is blood in the water. And now, someone dangerous has caught the scent. Vicious.
5:10 Speaker 02 I'm pretty sure that video is what drew him to me. He saw it, and he found his target.
5:19 Speaker 01 Natasha has no idea what's coming her way. 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 Sergeant Ben Finley is on his case. Vicious's campaign of internet terror is only just getting started.
5:42 Speaker 02 I was an earlier victim.
5:44 Speaker 01 But as we know, she definitely won't be the last. If Natasha wants to stand any chance of standing up to Vicious, strength in numbers is her only real hope. She's gonna need to work together with fellow streamers just like her, figure out Vicious's tactics, and put a stop to them.
6:12 Speaker 01 From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, this is You Are Next. I'm Leigh Alexander.
6:40 Speaker 01 This is episode four, League of Girls.
6:52 Speaker 01 As a longtime game and technology journalist, I've spent a lot of hours thinking about why people behave the way they do online,
7:02 Speaker 01 why they flock to some games and reject others, but also what communities they seek out.
7:11 Speaker 01 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.
7:29 Speaker 01 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.
7:49 Speaker 01 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.
8:25 Speaker 02 I would run around at like three years old, like, I want a pewter. I want a pewter because I really wanted a computer to play games.
8:33 Speaker 01 By the time she's old enough to actually say the word "computer," Natasha gets her wish.
8:40 Speaker 02 My dad surprised me with this custom-made one for my birthday. He had one of his coworkers build me a computer that was see-through with all these lights. It was really cool.
8:53 Speaker 01 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.
9:07 Speaker 02 I made a lot of friends and I joined like Skype groups or 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.
9:19 Speaker 01 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.
9:32 Speaker 02 There's a lot of great parts of it, but the community has a toxicity issue for everyone.
9:38 Speaker 01 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.
9:46 Speaker 02 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.
10:00 Speaker 01 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.
10:15 Speaker 02 We had this tribunal where you could get involved and punish bad players and judge them. The community almost helped regulate itself.
10:28 Speaker 01 Now, there's a new player emerging from the shadows, more dangerous than anyone Natasha or her friends has dealt with before:
10:39 Speaker 01 vicious.
10:46 Speaker 01 It's summer 2013. Natasha's about 20. Fresh off of her surprise viral video, she's trying to capitalize on the publicity. She logs onto her computer and starts streaming.
10:58 Speaker 02 Within a couple of minutes, my stream would just go down. And then you would try to go up again, and then your internet would go down. And I would be so confused.
11:10 Speaker 01 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 DDoS.
11:19 Speaker 02 A denial-of-service attack. They send a bunch of information really quickly at your router, essentially, and make it impossible for you to have internet.
11:30 Speaker 01 Remember, this is 2013. Vicious is only just getting started on his campaign of internet terror. His reputation isn't preceding him yet.
11:39 Speaker 02 I honestly didn't know that much about him.
11:43 Speaker 01 But then Natasha starts hearing things through the gamer grapevine.
11:49 Speaker 01 Practically, all of her friends are also being DDoSed.
11:53 Speaker 02 We weren't sure what was going on.
11:57 Speaker 02 And then eventually, you get a message from this guy
12:01 Speaker 02 bragging that he was the one responsible.
12:05 Speaker 01 At this point, they only know him on social media by his username.
12:09 Speaker 02 We were all streaming, so he was simultaneously watching all our streams to look for information of something he could exploit.
12:19 Speaker 02 He would first try to do something to get your attention, DDoS you for a long time.
12:26 Speaker 01 Next, the messages start pouring in.
12:32 Speaker 02 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 way he could, he would reach you.
12:50 Speaker 01 Soon, Vicious graduates from the DMs and the DDoS attacks. He starts hacking into Natasha and her friend's accounts.
12:58 Speaker 02 He would actually hack into people's Skype through social engineering, where he would call Skype.
13:04 Speaker 01 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.
13:17 Speaker 02 Convincing Skype to give 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 wrong." 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 Skypes.
13:36 Speaker 01 Vicious's behavior is rapidly escalating.
13:43 Speaker 01 It's not long before he starts doxing Natasha, publicly posting private information about her.
13:49 Speaker 02 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. Or if he could find your Facebook, he could find where you went to school. And then eventually, he could, for a lot of people, find even their address or their phone number or their email. I remember him 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 could message you.
14:27 Speaker 01 And were the messages themselves ever abusive? Or was it the threat of, "I can find you, I can reach you"?
14:35 Speaker 02 It was mainly the threat of, "You better do what I want, or this is gonna get worse." He was just after power and attention. He wanted you to feel helpless and for him to feel completely powerful.
14:50 Speaker 01 All the while, whenever Natasha or any of her friends try to stream, Vicious is there with another DDoS attack, stopping them from being able to broadcast and from building up their following.
15:01 Speaker 02 He wanted to make sure that you didn't succeed.
15:05 Speaker 01 The League players are constantly checking in on each other, sharing the latest about what's happening to them, sending support and advice.
15:13 Speaker 02 They would message me, or I would message them to make sure they're okay.
15:17 Speaker 01 Then Natasha gets another message. This time from Vicious.
15:26 Speaker 03 If you want this to stop, you have to talk to me.
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16:47 Speaker 01 The last thing Natasha wants to do is give Vicious even a millisecond of her time.
16:52 Speaker 02 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.
17:01 Speaker 01 But she also doesn't see any other choice. She and her friends are totally under siege.
17:08 Speaker 02 I had decent viewership and I really enjoyed it and I wasn't able to capitalize on it. 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 wanted us to be able to do our jobs.
17:33 Speaker 01 So Natasha reluctantly agrees.
17:36 Speaker 02 I did talk to him, just so my other teammates could play. I was kind of just in the management mode, which I tend to do in those kind of situations. Like, just get through this, figure out later.
17:52 Speaker 01 Natasha gets on a Skype call with Vicious.
17:56 Speaker 01 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.
18:05 Speaker 02 Can I curse? I thought he was an asshole.
18:10 Speaker 02 I thought he was an asshole. Like, he would talk about my other teammates, he would badmouth them.
18:17 Speaker 01 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.
18:32 Speaker 02 I was stuck talking to him anyway, so what else am I gonna talk about? I just asked him basic questions. I was like, "How did you get our IP? How are you getting all this 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 it, other than he was just like peacocking.
18:54 Speaker 01 Did he speak to you about his other targets?
18:57 Speaker 02 Yes, he did. He was sharing his screen. He had an actual, like, file. He would make text file.
19:08 Speaker 02 He would just store, like, you have your victim's name, and he would store the information he needed to harass them.
19:16 Speaker 02 Showing how he could hurt other people, showing how much power, what he could accomplish. It's part of like, a controlled harassment campaign. Very aggressive and sociopathic.
19:30 Speaker 01 To Natasha, it feels like Vicious is everywhere she turns.
19:34 Speaker 02 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.
20:14 Speaker 01 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.
20:27 Speaker 01 His target list includes a lot of up and coming streamers like Natasha, but it also includes some more established names.
20:35 Speaker 02 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 like this chat room, basically, where there are a few other like self-proclaimed hackers, as they would call themselves.
20:56 Speaker 01 These self-proclaimed hackers share a lot of the toxic misogynist views running rife 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.
21:17 Speaker 02 Their whole goal, like their stated goal of that chatroom, was to bully and target women.
21:23 Speaker 01 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 Gamergate.
21:38 Speaker 01 Most people associate the beginning of Gamergate with an online post made by a bitter ex-boyfriend. He claimed his video game maker ex, named Zoe Quinn, cheated on him with a journalist, who then gave Zoe's game a positive review.
21:56 Speaker 01 Never mind that the accusation was completely untrue. This post started off an 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.
22:14 Speaker 01 A coordinated online mob formed, full of what I'd describe as alpha nerds. They didn't actually care about games journalism, they were looking for an excuse to express their misogyny.
22:27 Speaker 01 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.
23:15 Speaker 01 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.
23:36 Speaker 02 The thing was, you always knew he could come back at any time. So it's not like you felt safe.
23:43 Speaker 01 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.
23:57 Speaker 01 So Vicious better watch out, because he's pissing off an army.
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24:43 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
25:24 Speaker 01 By 2014, would you say he was known to the League community? Like, how aware were other players of this issue?
25:31 Speaker 02 I think among especially women, he was well-known.
25:35 Speaker 01 By this point, Vicious is causing so much damage in the League of Legends community and beyond that he's making enemies everywhere.
25:47 Speaker 01 People start doxing him, posting his personal information on different forums. It's those same posts that Sergeant Ben Finley would eventually come across, revealing Vicious as a Canadian teenager. Whenever a post about him goes up, the streamers share it around with each other.
26:05 Speaker 02 The only reason we ever found out information was because of these other girls and their efforts. And I think because he had escalated with them to swatting. The swatting is when the general knowledge started being known.
26:18 Speaker 01 A lot of streamers have Amazon wish lists linked to their Twitch accounts, things subscribers can buy for them. One streamer, who we'll 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 P O 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. Vicious is under more and more scrutiny from female streamers who are banding together
27:02 Speaker 01 to share information about him and strategies for fighting back.
27:09 Speaker 01 But he's showing no signs of stopping.
27:15 Speaker 01 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 DDoS's 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, vicious threatens to rape his daughter.
27:37 Speaker 01 He zeroes in on one streamer and starts calling her home every night and calling her cellphone as much as 20 times a day. But he's always got Natasha in his sights too.
27:52 Speaker 02 When he would decide to reach out to me, it was unrelenting. It was a lot at once.
27:58 Speaker 01 Endless messages across Twitter, across Twitch. More and more DDoS attacks.
28:05 Speaker 02 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?"
28:22 Speaker 01 What does it feel like when you know that this person has your home address?
28:27 Speaker 02 It was pretty scary because at this point, you were actually possibly putting your family and 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. There's this 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
29:11 Speaker 02 in case a false call comes in." They made me feel really small and silly and like I was stupid, basically. She's just like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Like, I can't help you. Just move on." No matter where I turned, I was just met with like, "What are you talking about?"
29:29 Speaker 01 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.
29:44 Speaker 02 I changed my Skype name to sound like I was a boy. And I was able to kind of stay under the radar from him for a bit. I had to learn how to change our IP address.
29:57 Speaker 01 But it seems like Vicious can still find and target Natasha and her friends whenever he wants.
30:03 Speaker 02 The problem was, as long as he had our Skype, if one of our teammates logged into Skype, it would instantly give him our new IP address.
30:11 Speaker 01 To Natasha, her local police don't seem to be able, or even willing, to stop him.
30:20 Speaker 01 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, or if she even wants to stream anymore.
30:33 Speaker 02 It made me 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 just dealing with awful things that most people don't ever have to deal with.
30:50 Speaker 01 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. You don't get to do the work that you came to do, 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.
31:07 Speaker 02 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. I was not as perky. I 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? And 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.
31:45 Speaker 01 On the next episode of You Are Next.
31:50 Speaker 02 He would start cycling through victims.
31:53 Speaker 01 Victims like Ava. If you wanted to ruin your life, he really could. The motivation for him to do these things is to feel like he has power over these women. But Ava is about to take the power back with an audacious undercover mission.
32:09 Speaker 06 It was a big risk, but I can stop him.
32:12 Speaker 01 And the tide might finally be starting to turn as Sergeant Ben Finley finds a powerful new ally in his fight.
32:19 Speaker 07 That was the game-changing moment. Once we got started, Sergeant Finley and I never gave up. We never stopped.
32:43 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
33:15 Speaker 01 This is You Are Next, an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, hosted by me, Lee Alexander. Lee Meyer is our senior producer. Verdi De Cala is our assistant producer. Sandra Schmueli is our editor. Production management from Cherie Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe. 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 Sher Levin at Miller-Korsenick-Rayman LLP, and to Ford Collier, who performed the woodwind for our theme music.
34:01 Speaker 01 And a big thanks to the whole Sony Music Entertainment team.
34:13 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
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