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