WEBVTT

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JACK: [MUSIC] Okay, so, this episode has mature content. I don’t recommend listening

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to this with young ears around or on some kind of speaker where others might hear it because

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this episode gets into some dark stuff, so listener discretion is advised. Alright,

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so this episode is about a mobile app called Kik, spelled K-I-K. It was made in 2010 to help mobile

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users be able to chat with one another easier. See, back then, people who had BlackBerry phones

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had a hard time chatting with Android users and iPhone users, so some Canadian college kids made

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Kik to be able to let people chat freely no matter what type of phone you had. Kik was an immediate

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hit. Just one month after launching they reported to have one million users and it’s been growing

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rapidly ever since. But something happened in the Kik chat app which sent this app down a dark path.

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(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are

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true stories from the dark side of the internet.

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I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

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JACK:

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This is the tale of two different Kik users. First is a guy who we’ll call Doctor.

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DOC: Some person, I don’t remember their name, said that Kik was a good app to meet people on

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and to join some communities. I figured well, why not? Might as well try it. So, I joined.

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JACK: Sounds innocent enough. Everyone can use new friends, right? So, that’s why Doctor joined Kik.

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By the way, Doc is like, twenty-something years old and I’m just disguising his voice a bit. Now,

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when you join Kik, you can do so anonymously. All the questions are soft, like it asks for

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your e-mail but you could just put anything in there because they don’t e-mail you any sort

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of registration confirmation link or anything. It asks for your phone number but you can skip that,

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too. Yeah, when you get on Kik, you can be whoever you want without giving any details

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as to who you really are. The other guy we’ll hear from we’ll call Azrael.

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AZRAEL: Everybody was telling me to make an account just to hang out and message

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them on there instead of whatever we were using at the time. I don’t even remember.

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JACK: This is called the network effect and it’s powerful. The more people who

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join and want to chat with other people, the more they invite other people to join. So,

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you’re either on Kik or you’re not, and if Kik is where all your friends are,

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you might as well get in there and be there with them. Now, these two people, Doctor and Azrael,

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have entirely different stories that take them down two different paths while using Kik,

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and we’re gonna weave in and out and back and forth between the two of them. This should be fun.

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AZRAEL: [MUSIC] Kik is an old instant messaging app.

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DOC: You can chat, share pictures, videos.

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JACK: On the app, you can connect with someone you know and send them private

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messages or you can join chat rooms. In fact, when you first install the app,

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it tries to show you some cool chat rooms to try joining. Rooms have themes; like,

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you can join a room about Pokemon or Fortnite or different regions of the world where people live.

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DOC: You can find different groups based on search preferences, so you can use different

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tags and such to try and find specific groups that might share interests with what you’re

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looking for. It’s like, really, it’s ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ It has a lot

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of potential and being a good forum site where everyone can be there and have fun and make good

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groups and start good communities. But it is not maintained well enough, so it has its darker side.

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JACK: Ah, yes, the dark side of Kik. That’s what I’m interested in, so let’s go there. But first,

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let’s back up and talk about the company who runs Kik. You’re gonna be very curious about

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this eventually, so we might as well get into it now. [MUSIC] Kik was created by some Canadian

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students in University of Waterloo in 2010. A month after launching, it had a million users.

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Five years later, the Chinese company Tencent invested 50 million dollars into Kik, trying

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to make it the WeChat of the West. WeChat is a massive chat app in Asia, so Tencent saw potential

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in Kik. This helped explode Kik’s popularity. By this point, the company was called Kik Interactive

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and they had a whole team of people working there. There was a CEO who oversaw everything,

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bunches of employees, marketers, a whole team of people who were working on Kik. Their team was

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expanding fast too, with dozens of employees at the time. In 2015, Kik reported it had

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240 million users and 70% of them were between [00:05:00] the ages of thirteen and twenty-four.

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AZRAEL: I actually went and looked at the terms of service ‘cause I wanted

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to actually know what you’re supposed to do with the app. It’s marketed for kids thirteen

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and up. It’s actually, you’re not supposed to share any not-safe-for-work imagery. They

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actually have certain words blocked so you can’t name your chat certain things.

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Like, you can’t use any curse words in the naming of your chats.

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JACK: That’s right; Kik is for kids. In fact, if you go to kik.com/brands,

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which is the web page they use to pitch to potential advertisers, the title of the page

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says Reach Teens in Their World. It goes on to say that one out of three American teens use Kik.

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Kik loves marketing this app to teens because it’s well-known that teens are trendsetters,

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so if teens make a social platform popular, then everyone else will eventually come,

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too. That’s what happened with MySpace, Facebook, and so many others.

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But despite it being super popular, Kik didn’t really have a way to make money. In fact,

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they were losing money fast, so they had to come up with a plan to make Kik profitable. They saw

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that WeChat is not only a chat app but also a payment app. You can use it like Venmo or whatever

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and send money back and forth between users. Kik wanted to do something like that but at the same

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time, they saw the boom in cryptocurrencies and decided to make their own cryptocoin called Kin.

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[MUSIC] In 2017, they launched Kin. Now, to start out, Kik gave themselves tons of this

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cryptocurrency and they were telling people that there’s two ways to initially obtain it;

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there would be a private pre-sale and there would later be a public sale. In both methods though,

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people would buy this Kin with Ethereum from Kik. The private pre-sale resulted in Kik selling 50

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million dollars worth of Kin. By the time the public sale was over, Kik had made 98 million

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dollars from doing this initial sale of their Kin cryptocurrency. All that money went straight into

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Kik’s bank account. The SEC warned them about raising money through cryptocurrencies like

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this. They had to follow certain rules and it gets tricky. But it didn’t seem like Kik respected the

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rules, so in 2019 the SEC filed suit against Kik and Kin, alleging securities violations. We’re

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getting into some legal weeds here but it seems like Kik is saying that Kin is a cryptocurrency

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and it shouldn’t be considered a security, but the SEC was saying well, if you’re using

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it to raise money for your company, you’re sort of treating it like it is a security.

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Kik was saying it was a currency; the SEC was saying it’s more like a stock. It’s tricky

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because, well, yeah, it is a currency. Kik was really using it to raise money for their company,

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basically treating it like a security. So, Kik and the SEC went into a fierce legal battle.

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This legal battle was rough and changed everything about Kik. The team at Kik was

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tied up with this lawsuit and just loved all the money they were making with Kin,

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so they just sort of stopped caring about Kik, their chat app. Kin was making money. Kik was

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losing money. It’s as if Kik Interactive split into two when they made Kin. In fact,

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they made their own separate entity called the Kin Foundation which just focused on Kin. So,

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in 2019, Ted Livingston, the founder of both Kik and Kin, announced that Kik would no longer be

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supported. They were done with it and they were going to shift focus entirely to work on Kin.

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In fact, they took their staff of almost 100 people down to just 19 people. The CEO said,

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quote, “Going forward, our nineteen-person team will be focused on one goal; getting millions of

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people to buy Kin to use it.” End quote. So, nobody, I mean nobody was left to work on the

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Kik chat app. The app was abandoned by its own company and Kik Interactive announced it would be

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shutting down the chat in app in October 2019. [MUSIC] But then a company called MediaLab AI

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stepped in. This is a California-based company who owns several other chat apps like Secret,

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Yik Yak, and Whisper. They offered to buy Kik, so it was sold to MediaLab. We don’t know for

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how much but this is who owns Kik today; MediaLab AI. So, the app is still alive

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and growing even today. Now, you’re gonna find all this to be pretty important later,

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so thanks for sticking with me through this. Now, MediaLab has a history of buying failing apps and

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trying to make them profitable. So, what’s the first thing they do when they buy Kik?

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DOC: The only thing MediaLabs did was [00:10:00] the second they took over,

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everybody started seeing ads on the app.

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JACK: If you use Kik today, you’ll undoubtedly see ads everywhere. They’re in chat rooms;

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they’re in private messages. It’s pretty much a permanent banner at the top of the app that’s

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always displaying ads. So, that brings us to today. I haven’t seen recent numbers but the

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latest count that I saw was that Kik has over 300 million users and it’s owned by MediaLab AI

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and they’re likely doing as little work as they can to just make it profitable and keep it going.

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Alright, so you get in there, you’re playing around. What do you discover when you’re in there?

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DOC: So, what I discover is that there are many groups for many, many,

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many different things. I join a few groups, some related to some gaming stuff, and then I start

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noticing that some people are talking about some more kinky groups. Let’s call it that.

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But I also start noticing some other groups that generally just share straight-up porn.

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JACK: Ah yeah, a chat program which lets you make rooms about whatever

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you want and post pictures and videos of whatever you want; yeah,

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of course there’s gonna be porn there. But you know, posting porn online is typically legal.

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DOC: As long as the porn is legal and it’s in and of itself,

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that the actors in it are legal and legal age in the country that they’re from and in the country

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that it is being shown in and that there’s no acts in it that are illegal such as rape,

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as long as that is ticked off, then it is legal to my knowledge, at least.

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JACK: Okay. So, how’s the porn scene on Kik? Here’s the thing that’s weird already, right?

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You’ve got this – target audience is thirteen to twenty-four-year-olds. 70% of their users is that

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and yet, there’s porn channels. It’s interesting that they have that already but

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yeah, how’s the porn scene over there on Kik?

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AZRAEL: It is very active.

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Some of the actual social groups I joined were much less active than the porn groups.

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JACK: So, when you get into a porn chan or room or whatever it’s called, what’s going on there?

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Are people just posting photo after photo of nudity and stuff like that or is there videos

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being posted, or is it – do you ask people hey, do you have something like this, or do you just

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– is it like TV? You just turn it on and you see what’s there or is there – it is like…

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DOC: Yes to all of the above. It depends a lot from group to group. In a lot of groups when you

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join, first you are you asked to verify because there are a lot of bots on Kik,

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so to avoid there being bots and people who aren’t active and such, you’re being asked to verify. So,

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you send a message to an admin and they tell you to send something; maybe a video, some porn

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video so that you show that you are willing to share, or maybe a live picture of yourself

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or something like that. Then you get into the group and, well, depending on the group, you can

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be finding all of the things that you mentioned. Some are very, very active and people just share

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a lot of pictures and videos. Other groups are less active and you have to specifically ask

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for what people want, so to speak. That’s kind of where I got my start, actually,

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is trading, as it’s called, where you – where people have some request for something in

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porn and then you try and give it to them. Then in return, they give something back.

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It is videos and pictures, and that’s kind of where I got really interested in it because,

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well, when you’ve seen one pair of boobs, you’ve seen them all, so – to a degree. So, the porn

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part pretty quickly got boring but trading was very, very different and a lot more fun.

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JACK: So, this is how Doctor got started trading pornography on Kik. People would ask for certain

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types of explicit material, he’d hunt for it, find it, and then share it in the channel or privately

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to that user. In return he’d get some other picture or video which he’d then save so that

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he could maybe give that to someone else someday. This is all free, too; just show up and be active,

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really. But the thing is, Kik’s terms of service strictly [00:15:00] forbids this type of activity.

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So does Facebook, too. Pornography isn’t allowed to be posted on either of those platforms,

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but Kik’s terms of service says users aren’t allowed to share material that’s unlawful,

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obscene, defamatory, liablist, threatening, or pornographic, and the list goes on. But

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the point here is that porn is not permitted on Kik, so it just shouldn’t even be there,

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yet Doctor was telling us how prolific it is on there. With a couple searches,

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you can quickly find channels full of porn. Yeah, a lot of their users are teenagers, so

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I guess we should catch up with Azrael again for a minute. So, while Doctor was

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on there trading porn, Azrael was on a whole different path. He was just hanging out in an

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anime channel doing normal things that people do in chat groups, nothing kinky or weird.

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AZRAEL: One of the chats I was an administrator for got raided [MUSIC] by a source clan – were

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immoral raiders and they just – somebody dropped into their chat, gave them a hashtag, they hit

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the chat. They jumped in, tried a few spambots; spambots weren’t spamming hard enough, so they

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just started threatening people. They claimed to have our IPs and I knew that you couldn’t really

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grab IPs without some special tools so we would remove them and it was like that for a couple

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hours. I was just removing account after account after account. Then they started private messaging

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me pictures of gore and claiming that they would do that to me ‘cause they had my address

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and all this and that. I just didn’t care. Eventually I got legitimately angry and talked

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to a buddy of mine who was into the exploitation side of Kik and he got me my first actual mod

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that I could hit people with. That’s where it all started, I guess. [MUSIC]

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What happened was, I kinda started spotting these people that were using modified APKs.

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JACK: APKs are what Android apps are. That’s just how they are bundled and

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that’s how they come. What he found were people were taking

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Kik and modifying the app to do different things, pretty much hacking the app itself.

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AZRAEL: The only exploit back then was you could turn off your read

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receipts and see who was reading your messages.

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JACK: Ah, right, so when you send someone a message,

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it’ll show you if it’s read or not. But with this modified version of Kik,

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you could make it so that the messages you actually did read show as unread to others.

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AZRAEL: I don’t count that as an exploit, considering. But then

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things started ramping up and the old owners of Kik released the source code. After that,

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the modding community with it went wild. That’s where blue mods came in, Kingskull, and all that.

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JACK: What is…

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AZRAEL: Kingskull…

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JACK: What are these things? What are the mods? What – is there – what, are there

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bots in these things or something? Is that what you’re talking about?

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AZRAEL: Yes, yes. So, my custom APK, basically it has a few basic exploits;

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I can see who reads my messages, I can prevent people from seeing that I read messages,

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I can send raw XML files which are stanzas, and all that sort of stuff.

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JACK: Hm, interesting. There’s a whole community on Kik who run customized versions of Kik that

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allows them to have different features that the normal user doesn’t have. Now, keep in mind,

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this also is not allowed in Kik. It’s against the terms of use. It specifically says, quote,

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“Except as permitted by us in writing, you agree not to reproduce, distribute, modify,

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prepare derivative works of, translate, reverse-engineer, reverse-compile,

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or disassemble the services in whole or in part.” End quote. So yeah, MediaLab doesn’t

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want people modifying their app to make it do extra stuff like this, but apparently MediaLab

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isn’t monitoring for this type of activity, so there’s quite a few people doing this. In fact,

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there’s a guy named Lou who made a modded version of Kik and he was actually trying to sell it.

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AZRAEL: He wanted you to pay fifty bucks for it but who pays for shit?

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JACK: [MUSIC] So, this is what Azrael was seeing; modded versions of Kik, and he was

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fascinated by all the extra things you could do that a normal user couldn’t. On top of that,

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he was seeing that there were all these raider clans on Kik [00:20:00] who would go infiltrate

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chat channels and attempt to try to grief other channels or something. He really didn’t like

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that his anime channel got raided, so he modded up his Kik client to help defend his channel.

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AZRAEL: That has a bot system where you can lock your chat so that anybody who joins is immediately

00:20:22.020 --> 00:20:29.280
removed and a couple other things like that. You can censor words so if somebody says a censored

00:20:29.280 --> 00:20:38.100
word, they’re removed. My smart thing I did was I went and got a list of all the working raid

00:20:38.100 --> 00:20:46.440
bots and plugged them in one at a time into my censors list so any time anybody added the bot,

00:20:46.440 --> 00:20:50.820
removed. So, it completely prevented us from getting raided.

00:20:50.820 --> 00:20:57.600
JACK: This was cool to him at least, to have a sort of super-powered Kik client to do extra stuff

00:20:57.600 --> 00:21:02.580
that other people couldn’t, but it fascinated him to the point where he wanted to know what other

00:21:02.580 --> 00:21:08.880
modded clients you could get with other features. He eventually found one that let him send XML

00:21:08.880 --> 00:21:16.560
stanzas to other users. Let me explain. See, Kik uses a protocol called XMPP which sends messages

00:21:16.560 --> 00:21:24.840
from one user to another. XMPP uses XML to encode and format the actual messages being sent. So,

00:21:24.840 --> 00:21:30.000
just think of XML as this language that each side of the chat app understands and it’s how

00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:37.260
communication happens in the app. Well, Azrael’s Kik client had the ability to modify the way that

00:21:37.260 --> 00:21:42.840
XML message looked when sending a message to someone. He could essentially inject a stanza

00:21:42.840 --> 00:21:48.540
of code which is just like a snippet of code into the chat, and then this would be executed

00:21:48.540 --> 00:21:54.480
by other Kik clients that are in that chat room. When another user would see that stanza, their

00:21:54.480 --> 00:22:00.060
client would have to process that code which would sometimes make their chat app do weird things.

00:22:00.060 --> 00:22:05.160
AZRAEL: So, you could join a chat, send a stanza through the XML system and it

00:22:05.160 --> 00:22:11.160
was like oh, this user was just given admin. Then you have admin ability.

00:22:11.160 --> 00:22:15.120
JACK: [MUSIC] Whoa, to get admin ability to any chat

00:22:15.120 --> 00:22:20.220
room you wanted? That’s crazy. You can just take over any chat room any time.

00:22:20.220 --> 00:22:23.340
AZRAEL: That was patched, so that isn’t a thing anymore.

00:22:23.340 --> 00:22:26.520
JACK: Okay, good. Glad that was fixed. People shouldn’t be able

00:22:26.520 --> 00:22:31.320
to just take over chat rooms. But we’re starting to see Azrael’s path take shape,

00:22:31.320 --> 00:22:37.080
here. He’s exploiting the Kik app to defend chat rooms. But can you guess where this is going?

00:22:37.080 --> 00:22:43.020
It doesn’t quite seem dark yet, right? It just kinda seems like a Nerf fight.

00:22:43.020 --> 00:22:44.814
AZRAEL: Yeah. It really…

00:22:44.814 --> 00:22:47.820
JACK: To play like, oh, I’ve got a chat room and I’m trying to defend

00:22:47.820 --> 00:22:50.280
my chat room. It doesn’t seem that big of a deal.

00:22:50.280 --> 00:22:51.600
AZRAEL: It really wasn’t.

00:22:51.600 --> 00:22:53.820
JACK: So, where does – how does this get worse?

00:22:53.820 --> 00:23:02.340
AZRAEL: So, I started noticing other chats were getting raided and there were clans,

00:23:02.340 --> 00:23:08.520
and these clans had a large number of exploits. I was thinking at the time if

00:23:08.520 --> 00:23:13.860
I join one of these clans, not only will I have all of their exploits but I’ll be

00:23:13.860 --> 00:23:20.280
able to learn to the point where maybe I can pivot off Kik and help people there

00:23:20.280 --> 00:23:26.520
or I’ll just have enough exploits that nobody can touch my chat room.

00:23:26.520 --> 00:23:31.560
JACK: There’s something funny about the way you say it. For someone just listening to it

00:23:31.560 --> 00:23:35.452
for the first time, when you say ‘clans’ and there’s, I don’t know, ‘raid clans’…

00:23:35.452 --> 00:23:40.020
AZRAEL: It sounds very childish. I understand, no.

00:23:40.020 --> 00:23:42.180
JACK: Alright clan, here’s what we’re gonna do;

00:23:42.180 --> 00:23:45.260
we’re gonna get together and we’re gonna raid this channel.

00:23:45.260 --> 00:23:57.960
AZRAEL: Yeah. Basically, the clan I joined at the time was called Raindrop and they were focused

00:23:57.960 --> 00:24:08.580
on just anti-toxicity, you know what I mean? So, if one of our spies joined a chat and the chat

00:24:08.580 --> 00:24:18.600
was toxic and they would, say, share somebody’s pictures that didn’t want them shared or the admin

00:24:18.600 --> 00:24:24.480
was just really rude and mean and kicked people for no reason, we would go and take the chat.

00:24:24.480 --> 00:24:30.000
JACK: So, while Azrael used to defend chat rooms from takeovers and spammers,

00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:36.600
he’s now become one of the spammers and raiders. Now, the tactic to take over a channel is somewhat

00:24:36.600 --> 00:24:40.980
interesting. First, a bunch of people join from his clan and then they start spamming like crazy,

00:24:40.980 --> 00:24:46.140
posting pictures, text, whatever, and it just becomes a constant stream of scrolling

00:24:46.140 --> 00:24:50.340
information. You really can’t read anything when you’re in that room. People with slow

00:24:50.340 --> 00:24:54.720
internet connections might get lagged out. People with notifications on might just get

00:24:54.720 --> 00:25:00.060
bells ringing constantly and yeah, the admins could kick people, but the raiders knew who the

00:25:00.060 --> 00:25:04.560
admins [00:25:00] were and would target them specifically with crazy stanzas and all kinds

00:25:04.560 --> 00:25:09.900
of private messages, XML that’s all buggy, and things to just make their app freeze.

00:25:09.900 --> 00:25:14.400
Once the admins start falling out of the chat room and they can get enough people in that chat room,

00:25:14.400 --> 00:25:20.640
they can take it over. This is the kind of stuff Azrael starts doing and was having fun

00:25:20.640 --> 00:25:25.500
with it. While all this is going on in Kik, Doctor is still over there in some

00:25:25.500 --> 00:25:30.360
other chat rooms fulfilling peoples’ desires to see certain porn. I’m not

00:25:30.360 --> 00:25:35.640
quite sure I understand this whole trade – the whole reason why anyone would want to trade,

00:25:35.640 --> 00:25:41.340
but I don’t think I need to really get into it, so – ‘cause it just seems like oh, you want to

00:25:41.340 --> 00:25:46.080
masturbate? Here, I’ll give you some stuff. It’s just weird to help people masturbate, but okay.

00:25:46.080 --> 00:25:53.880
DOC: Yeah, it is weird and when you put it like that, it’s – it is very,

00:25:53.880 --> 00:26:02.160
very weird. I found it kind of oddly fun in a way just because it was –

00:26:02.160 --> 00:26:09.480
more in the challenge because very – because I was very good at trading, very good at

00:26:09.480 --> 00:26:16.560
getting a lot of stuff, so very quickly I had more than 2,000, 3,000 items in my library.

00:26:16.560 --> 00:26:20.040
JACK: Now, keep in mind, Kik is only a mobile app,

00:26:20.040 --> 00:26:25.200
so everything these guys are doing is 100% on their phone. So when someone requested some porn,

00:26:25.200 --> 00:26:30.300
he’d have to go looking through thousands of things on his phone to get a good one and send it.

00:26:30.300 --> 00:26:36.600
DOC: Yeah. The part that made me good at trading was also that not only did I have that many – and

00:26:36.600 --> 00:26:46.200
I got more; I got over 8,000. But I was able to pretty much memorize them. So, I had watched most

00:26:46.200 --> 00:26:54.360
of what I got in a sort of objective manner so I knew what was in it. So, if people asked

00:26:54.360 --> 00:26:59.040
something, I knew okay, do I have that or do I not have that? Do I have something that falls close

00:26:59.040 --> 00:27:06.900
to those criteria? Approximately when did I get it so that I can find it in relation to others?

00:27:06.900 --> 00:27:12.540
Then I could scroll down and find it. So, the challenge became people asked for something

00:27:12.540 --> 00:27:19.740
and I had this little calling signet that I posted out; ‘the Doctor’s in,

00:27:19.740 --> 00:27:27.360
so if you have an itch that needs scratching…’. I had something like that.

00:27:27.360 --> 00:27:36.720
Well, to a degree, I think it’s a big part of it and why people are into it, into trading, is not

00:27:36.720 --> 00:27:47.040
just the whole kink thing but power, really. I think it’s the feeling of power that you get from

00:27:47.040 --> 00:27:55.680
being able to give people what they want always and that people recognize that.

00:27:55.680 --> 00:28:00.660
When I started out, people didn’t know me at all but very quickly a lot of people started noticing

00:28:00.660 --> 00:28:10.320
that I knew my business and if – and a lot of people started saying if anyone has it, it’s Doc.

00:28:10.320 --> 00:28:19.860
Getting recognized like that is a powerful feeling and to be honest, it’s a drug in a lot of ways.

00:28:19.860 --> 00:28:24.560
It’s a weirdly good feeling.

00:28:24.560 --> 00:28:27.240
JACK: How much time were you spending on this?

00:28:27.240 --> 00:28:32.040
DOC: Way too much.

00:28:32.040 --> 00:28:39.900
Way, way too much time on it. This was during the first lockdown around where I lived,

00:28:39.900 --> 00:28:46.200
so I had nothing but time. Like, it was one of the first things I did when I woke up,

00:28:46.200 --> 00:28:54.420
was see do I have any requests, anyone who’s personally messaged me?

00:28:54.420 --> 00:28:59.760
Then as I would go about my morning routine, get a cup of coffee and stuff, I would start

00:28:59.760 --> 00:29:09.900
looking through what they wanted, start finding some stuff, and I would go all day, pretty much.

00:29:09.900 --> 00:29:17.040
I might be playing games on the side, maybe even chatting to some people

00:29:17.040 --> 00:29:22.140
online, but I would pretty much be on my phone the entire day.

00:29:22.140 --> 00:29:26.700
JACK: Okay, so everyone has their own addiction. I’m not gonna judge. That’s just what Doc was

00:29:26.700 --> 00:29:31.320
into. But still, you might be asking, these are supposed to be true stories from the dark side of

00:29:31.320 --> 00:29:36.240
the internet. Raiding chat rooms and looking at porn is not that dark. Well, thanks for hanging

00:29:36.240 --> 00:29:40.380
out with me this long setting up the story because everything is about to get really dark

00:29:40.380 --> 00:29:48.540
from here. This is the last chance to turn back. After the break, it gets dark. Doc had been on a

00:29:48.540 --> 00:29:52.980
massive porn-trading binge but eventually got a request that he didn’t know how to fulfill.

00:29:52.980 --> 00:29:57.600
DOC: People sometimes started asking for

00:29:57.600 --> 00:30:03.240
what they generally just called CP. [00:30:00] At first I didn’t know and as soon as you asked

00:30:03.240 --> 00:30:13.020
what’s CP, nobody would say and they would just close the chat, block you. But after a while

00:30:13.020 --> 00:30:23.400
I figured out CP stood for child pornography and sometimes people also just refer to it as underage

00:30:23.400 --> 00:30:33.000
which was easier to understand at first, at least. But CP was kind of like, the code word that people

00:30:33.000 --> 00:30:40.980
used, the shorthand, and if you didn’t know what it was, you weren’t supposed to know, so to speak.

00:30:40.980 --> 00:30:49.320
Those items had a lot more value. Those were the ones that some people really wanted when they

00:30:49.320 --> 00:31:01.440
wanted to test what kind of collection you had and to see, oh, you maybe have these things and these

00:31:01.440 --> 00:31:06.600
things. Then they start talking about age slowly. Like, what are the age of the actresses and oh,

00:31:06.600 --> 00:31:12.780
do you have a little bit younger? How about a little bit younger? A little bit younger?

00:31:12.780 --> 00:31:20.340
It became really creepy very, very quickly and I couldn’t provide and I wouldn’t provide because

00:31:20.340 --> 00:31:27.660
I had some that looked very young but I knew that those were porn actresses that were like,

00:31:27.660 --> 00:31:35.040
22+, something like that, that I had looked up to make sure.

00:31:35.040 --> 00:31:43.800
[MUSIC] But then I started getting some items that I honestly didn’t know

00:31:43.800 --> 00:31:54.360
how young they were. People started valuing those items more in certain groups and age was all of a

00:31:54.360 --> 00:32:03.540
sudden a huge value factor, so that the lower the age would get, the higher the value item,

00:32:03.540 --> 00:32:15.900
no matter if it was picture or video. For comparison, a picture of an underage girl,

00:32:15.900 --> 00:32:25.880
a lot of people would value as the same value as five to ten normal porn videos.

00:32:25.880 --> 00:32:29.940
JACK: Now, while he’s trading porn to people all day, every day,

00:32:29.940 --> 00:32:32.580
he’s still collecting tons of porn on his phone.

00:32:32.580 --> 00:32:38.760
DOC: Maybe I was trading with someone and then they start sending some,

00:32:38.760 --> 00:32:46.940
and then I have to say oh, no CP, dude. But I would still get these things and see them.

00:32:46.940 --> 00:32:53.580
JACK: He was shocked that people had this type of content.

00:32:53.580 --> 00:33:02.280
DOC: At first, some of the stuff I saw made me horrified. Like, who would even keep this around

00:33:02.280 --> 00:33:06.300
and why would people send me this when I didn’t even ask for it?

00:33:06.300 --> 00:33:12.120
JACK: Then after he saw this a few more times, the shock wore off

00:33:12.120 --> 00:33:18.720
and after he saw it a few more times after that, he’d save that photo or video to his phone,

00:33:18.720 --> 00:33:24.420
still not giving it to others when they asked but keeping it because he was a collector.

00:33:24.420 --> 00:33:33.420
DOC: Over time I got jaded, so I really didn’t see the age as much anymore.

00:33:33.420 --> 00:33:39.000
At some point I realized that hey, I have access to a lot of these – a lot of people

00:33:39.000 --> 00:33:46.260
are asking for it. Well, sure. The power got to my head and I was like okay, sure,

00:33:46.260 --> 00:33:54.900
I can distribute some of it. But then I set a limit; I would not go below this age.

00:33:54.900 --> 00:33:55.075
JACK: What was – what age?

00:33:55.075 --> 00:33:59.340
DOC: The age was fourteen, I think.

00:33:59.340 --> 00:34:01.220
JACK: Nothing below fourteen years old.

00:34:01.220 --> 00:34:06.360
DOC: Yeah. JACK: Mm-hm.

00:34:06.360 --> 00:34:14.100
DOC: Again, as soon as I accepted that, it was just a downward spiral from there,

00:34:14.100 --> 00:34:24.360
really. [MUSIC] After a while, some of the stuff – I just stopped caring and I just saw the value

00:34:24.360 --> 00:34:32.820
of the item itself, not what was actually in it. It sounds horrible, I know. It felt horrible when

00:34:32.820 --> 00:34:39.560
I realized it later but at the time, I didn’t realize what I was doing and how bad it was.

00:34:39.560 --> 00:34:44.820
JACK: Do you have any idea how old the people were that you were trading these with?

00:34:44.820 --> 00:34:55.800
DOC: There was a wide range. Like, the youngest people I talked to was around ten or eleven.

00:34:55.800 --> 00:35:02.460
I wouldn’t get – I never gave them any porn but a lot of people [00:35:00] were trying to

00:35:02.460 --> 00:35:10.800
– people who were child molesters, they were trying to get them to make porn and that’s usually

00:35:10.800 --> 00:35:17.640
why they – why I got in touch with them, was not to get porn from them but because I was an admin

00:35:17.640 --> 00:35:24.660
in the same rooms, so they would come to me and say hey, this person is asking for nudes of me,

00:35:24.660 --> 00:35:30.720
and I would ban them, the people who were asking for nudes.

00:35:30.720 --> 00:35:37.080
JACK: Oh, right, this app is targeted towards teens. According to Kik, one in three American

00:35:37.080 --> 00:35:43.800
teenagers use Kik which means there’s probably a lot of pre-teens on there, too. That’s a really

00:35:43.800 --> 00:35:51.420
bad mix, when you have pre-teen children in the same chat room as people looking for child porn.

00:35:51.420 --> 00:35:56.820
This is ugly. This is really ugly and it can’t end well.

00:35:56.820 --> 00:36:03.180
DOC: The oldest I talked to I think were in their mid-sixties.

00:36:03.180 --> 00:36:07.680
JACK: What the hell is a sixty-year-old even doing in this chat app? Oh yeah,

00:36:07.680 --> 00:36:12.600
I know why; because porn and child porn is prolific on Kik.

00:36:12.600 --> 00:36:23.100
DOC: I was in a lot of rooms. When I was the most active, I was active in like, thirty or so rooms.

00:36:23.100 --> 00:36:24.600
JACK: Thirty porn rooms?

00:36:24.600 --> 00:36:26.400
DOC: If not more.

00:36:26.400 --> 00:36:31.920
JACK: See what I mean? I hate to say Kik just allows porn without knowing exactly what Kik is

00:36:31.920 --> 00:36:36.120
doing to stop this, but it’s incredibly easy to find porn in the app. I mean,

00:36:36.120 --> 00:36:40.260
Doctor says he was in thirty rooms himself, so you can see that this isn’t just a few

00:36:40.260 --> 00:36:44.700
bad people or just a small issue; there are a lot of people on Kik solely there

00:36:44.700 --> 00:36:49.980
for the porn. Not only that, but many of these rooms are actively posting child

00:36:49.980 --> 00:36:57.680
porn. How vast or how big is the child porn exchange system going on on Kik?

00:36:57.680 --> 00:37:05.940
DOC: Never-ending. If you use the right tags to search for

00:37:05.940 --> 00:37:11.580
when you’re searching for the private groups – not the private – the public groups even,

00:37:11.580 --> 00:37:17.900
you can find so many groups. It’s a very active scene, unfortunately.

00:37:17.900 --> 00:37:25.140
JACK: So, the moderators of Kik – obviously there’s moderators in

00:37:25.140 --> 00:37:30.440
each room but isn’t Kik at all moderating any of this stuff?

00:37:30.440 --> 00:37:36.840
DOC: Honestly, I don’t know. I think they try to,

00:37:36.840 --> 00:37:43.980
to some degree. I know that they have some form of

00:37:43.980 --> 00:37:49.440
artificial intelligence running through some of the rooms looking for some things,

00:37:49.440 --> 00:37:57.120
trying to recognize some patterns and see if these and these things are posted, then they

00:37:57.120 --> 00:38:05.180
will close down the rooms, maybe ban the users, and make sure the content is no longer viewable.

00:38:05.180 --> 00:38:09.480
JACK: How do you know that they’re running that?

00:38:09.480 --> 00:38:15.060
DOC: Because some people I’ve traded with,

00:38:15.060 --> 00:38:22.440
later on – if I look at the history of – chat history with them, I can go back and see oh,

00:38:22.440 --> 00:38:26.460
these things are no longer available and sometimes the rooms get shut down.

00:38:26.460 --> 00:38:32.340
JACK: Okay. I had to research this and this is what I found; Kik has a few methods to combat

00:38:32.340 --> 00:38:38.100
child pornography. In 2015, Kik partnered with Microsoft to test Microsoft’s PhotoDNA

00:38:38.100 --> 00:38:46.020
service. Apparently what Microsoft has is a database of known child porn image hashes. Now,

00:38:46.020 --> 00:38:51.000
hashes aren’t the images themselves; it’s just a string of text, like a fingerprint of the

00:38:51.000 --> 00:38:55.200
file. If you have the hash, you can’t generate the image from that but if you have the image,

00:38:55.200 --> 00:39:01.440
you can quickly generate a hash of that image. So, Kik was somehow using this PhotoDNA technology to

00:39:01.440 --> 00:39:06.420
scan their images to see if there was a known child porn image on their site. But I’m not

00:39:06.420 --> 00:39:11.820
sure exactly how they did that or what they did when they found a match, or even if this PhotoDNA

00:39:11.820 --> 00:39:17.160
service is still in use anymore. The last time I heard about it was in 2015. In Doc’s case,

00:39:17.160 --> 00:39:23.820
who started using Kik in 2020, he didn’t see any evidence that would suggest that this isn’t

00:39:23.820 --> 00:39:30.240
always on filter. There were child porn images posted all the time to chat rooms and private

00:39:30.240 --> 00:39:36.060
messages and those rooms would stay up and online forever. If you scroll back through

00:39:36.060 --> 00:39:40.260
the history in those chat rooms, you could see child porn that was posted long ago in the past.

00:39:40.260 --> 00:39:45.360
DOC: From what I can tell, it only starts looking in the rooms and

00:39:45.360 --> 00:39:48.960
looking at individual people if they are reported for something.

00:39:48.960 --> 00:39:55.740
JACK: So, if a user reports another user or chat room, then some kind of anti-child porn

00:39:55.740 --> 00:40:01.200
scan triggers and may remove content. I guess from Kik’s point of view, [00:40:00] there are

00:40:01.200 --> 00:40:05.820
probably millions of images posted every minute in safe and clean chat rooms,

00:40:05.820 --> 00:40:11.100
so maybe it’s just too expensive or too hard to scan every image to see if it’s a known

00:40:11.100 --> 00:40:17.160
child porn image. So, my guess is they’re just not very thorough with trying to combat this.

00:40:17.160 --> 00:40:21.780
But I don’t want to just take one guy’s opinion about what he saw on Kik. I want to do my own

00:40:21.780 --> 00:40:27.000
research on this and see if there’s other evidence I can find about child porn on Kik. Of course, I’m

00:40:27.000 --> 00:40:32.040
not gonna go on the app and look for it myself. Uh-uh; I’m staying far away from that for sure,

00:40:32.040 --> 00:40:37.860
but if I search the internet for Kik and child porn, news stories just start jumping out at me.

00:40:37.860 --> 00:40:41.400
HOST1: A Calabash man is accused of using an app to receive and

00:40:41.400 --> 00:40:46.380
send sexually explicit photos and videos of minors. According to arrest warrants,

00:40:46.380 --> 00:40:50.700
19-year-old Benjamin Lindsey used Kik – that’s a messenger app – to distribute

00:40:50.700 --> 00:40:54.210
the images. The unknown children are between the ages of seven and twelve.

00:40:54.210 --> 00:40:58.500
HOST2: The court documents say Joshua Richard Harrison confessed to posting

00:40:58.500 --> 00:41:01.620
explicit photos of children through the app Kik.

00:41:01.620 --> 00:41:06.960
HOST3: Milwaukee County Judge Brett Blomme’s Instagram page is filled with personal and

00:41:06.960 --> 00:41:11.460
professional highlights on his way to the judiciary, but after a search in

00:41:11.460 --> 00:41:17.640
Cottage Grove of one of his two homes and his arrest, authorities say his computer

00:41:17.640 --> 00:41:24.480
activity on the app Kik links him to child porn, with uploaded images and videos consistent with

00:41:24.480 --> 00:41:29.820
child pornography through the Kik app on twenty-seven occasions last fall. Judge

00:41:29.820 --> 00:41:34.740
Blomme has been on Milwaukee County’s Circuit Court bench since August. His assignment;

00:41:34.740 --> 00:41:40.740
children’s court. As a bond condition, he’s now banned by a court of having unsupervised

00:41:40.740 --> 00:41:46.140
contact with minors. The judge leaves this county’s criminal justice system knowing he

00:41:46.140 --> 00:41:52.080
will return not to dispense justice but to potentially have to accept its consequences.

00:41:52.080 --> 00:41:57.240
JACK: The news articles are continuous. There was a guy in Tuscon, Arizona who was arrested

00:41:57.240 --> 00:42:01.260
for posting child porn to a chat room in Kik. There was a guy in New Jersey who was arrested

00:42:01.260 --> 00:42:05.880
for trying to have sex with an underage girl on Kik. In 2020, a New York man was sentenced to

00:42:05.880 --> 00:42:12.540
eleven years in prison for possessing 1,500 images and 150 videos of pornographic material involving

00:42:12.540 --> 00:42:18.360
minors that was distributed on Kik. In 2020, an Ohio man was guilty for distributing child porn

00:42:18.360 --> 00:42:23.460
over Kik and got twenty years in prison. There are so many more cases; in fact, I’m looking at

00:42:23.460 --> 00:42:31.920
a BBC article now which is simply titled Kik Chat App Involved in 1,100 Child Abuse Cases.

00:42:31.920 --> 00:42:38.220
Just as a cursory glance, Kik has a very big problem with child abuse.

00:42:38.220 --> 00:42:42.000
Yes, this is child abuse; in fact, the common term I’ve seen used to describe

00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:48.540
this stuff is CSAM, spelled C-S-A-M which stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material.

00:42:48.540 --> 00:42:54.300
It’s simply defined as any sexually explicit image or video of anyone under eighteen years old. This

00:42:54.300 --> 00:43:00.900
can be a very traumatic experience for kids and the trauma comes right back any time they see the

00:43:00.900 --> 00:43:06.660
image again. There are organizations out there fighting hard to stop the spread of this. Now,

00:43:06.660 --> 00:43:12.240
before we get into those organizations, I want to know what Kik is doing about this. So,

00:43:12.240 --> 00:43:16.020
I reached out. I started where I normally reach out to anyone, which is Twitter.

00:43:16.020 --> 00:43:22.140
There’s a Kik account on Twitter. It has over 300,000 followers but looking at that account,

00:43:22.140 --> 00:43:28.140
they haven’t posted a single tweet since October 2019, over a year and a half ago,

00:43:28.140 --> 00:43:33.780
which was the same month that MediaLab bought them. However, in their bio, there’s a link for

00:43:33.780 --> 00:43:40.560
help and I need help for sure. So, I click the link which was help.kik.com. The first

00:43:40.560 --> 00:43:46.140
time I clicked it, I got a 404 page; Not Found. But then I clicked it again and it sent me to a

00:43:46.140 --> 00:43:53.520
Zendesk portal that doesn’t exist. The site just says ‘Oops, that help center no longer exists.’

00:43:53.520 --> 00:43:58.860
Okay, so Kik has no social media anymore and their help portal is just abandoned. They just

00:43:58.860 --> 00:44:03.060
seem to have completely canceled their Zendesk service and didn’t bother to update the URL in

00:44:03.060 --> 00:44:08.460
their Twitter bio. Alright, so next, let’s see if I can get help in the app. While using the app,

00:44:08.460 --> 00:44:14.160
I did find a way to message the Kik team directly which is a perfect way to get in-app help. So,

00:44:14.160 --> 00:44:18.900
I messaged them saying I need help, and the Kik team replies, ahoy there! I say,

00:44:18.900 --> 00:44:24.060
there seems to be a child porn problem here. What are you doing to stop this? Their reply was,

00:44:24.060 --> 00:44:29.100
if you believe the message you received contains illegal content, please contact your local law

00:44:29.100 --> 00:44:34.260
enforcement agency. You can also report this to our support team. Then they give me a link for

00:44:34.260 --> 00:44:40.560
support, but the link they give me is help.kik.com which is the same link in their Twitter bio,

00:44:40.560 --> 00:44:46.920
the link that’s been dead for years. So, I tell them that link doesn’t work. They reply to me,

00:44:46.920 --> 00:44:54.480
follow us on Twitter; twitter.com/kik. I’m like, that Twitter account has been inactive for years.

00:44:54.480 --> 00:45:00.540
Then they reply, howdy! At the point, I realized I was talking with a bot and [00:45:00] was getting

00:45:00.540 --> 00:45:05.820
nowhere and I was getting more frustrated. I really want someone from Kik to talk with me,

00:45:05.820 --> 00:45:11.940
so I looked for another way to contact them. I go to kik.com and click the Contact button.

00:45:11.940 --> 00:45:18.300
There are two e-mail addresses there. One is kiksupport@medialab.la. The other is

00:45:18.300 --> 00:45:23.580
kiksafety@medialab.la. The .la threw me off because the company’s name is MediaLab AI,

00:45:23.580 --> 00:45:29.160
but okay, whatever, I’ll try these e-mails. I e-mail Kik Support asking to speak with anyone

00:45:29.160 --> 00:45:33.180
there about this. I get a generic response; thanks for e-mailing us. We are experiencing

00:45:33.180 --> 00:45:38.460
unusually high e-mail volume and we’ll get back to you whenever we can. They never got back to me and

00:45:38.460 --> 00:45:44.580
it’s now been three months. I sent an e-mail to Kik Safety; no reply. Not even a confirmation that

00:45:44.580 --> 00:45:50.040
they got my e-mail. Yeah, that’s also been three months of waiting with nothing from them, either.

00:45:50.040 --> 00:45:53.580
I go back to their website. Who’s running Kik, I wonder?

00:45:53.580 --> 00:45:58.560
There’s a link at the bottom of the page called Safety Center. I click it; it has

00:45:58.560 --> 00:46:04.800
lots of information on being safe in the app but then at the bottom of the page are people’s

00:46:04.800 --> 00:46:12.120
faces. Meet our Safety Advisory Board. There’s a picture of Anne, Brooke, Justin, and Hemu.

00:46:12.120 --> 00:46:16.800
These are their advisors and Brooke is specifically advising them on child

00:46:16.800 --> 00:46:22.800
exploitation problems. Perfect. So, I message her on Twitter. No response. I message her on

00:46:22.800 --> 00:46:28.500
LinkedIn. No response. I give up on her and start going down the line. Anne is another advisor. I

00:46:28.500 --> 00:46:32.760
send her a tweet. She does reply but she tells me she hasn’t worked on the Kik Advisory Board

00:46:32.760 --> 00:46:37.320
in years. I also see Justin’s on the board. I tweet at him but he replies saying nope,

00:46:37.320 --> 00:46:42.900
I haven’t been on the board for years, either. Okay, so this entire advisory board which is

00:46:42.900 --> 00:46:47.400
posted publicly on their website is no longer valid. I’m starting to think they

00:46:47.400 --> 00:46:51.360
don’t have any advisors at this point and have not updated their website in years.

00:46:51.360 --> 00:46:58.440
It feels to me like MediaLab has abandoned Kik. Their website is defunct, their Twitter is

00:46:58.440 --> 00:47:02.700
defunct, there’s no phone number for them because there’s probably no one to answer the phone.

00:47:02.700 --> 00:47:09.960
Nobody appears to be home at Kik. But according to the Google Play Store, the app is still getting

00:47:09.960 --> 00:47:15.780
updates. About once a week it’ll have some kind of update, so someone is clearly back there doing

00:47:15.780 --> 00:47:21.060
something. But I’m telling you, after trying for months and months and months to get ahold of

00:47:21.060 --> 00:47:28.920
someone, anyone, I was completely unsuccessful. As far as I can tell, nobody is there.

00:47:28.920 --> 00:47:34.440
Once again, MediaLab is who owns Kik. They took it over when Kik was facing those SEC legal troubles

00:47:34.440 --> 00:47:39.840
and they knew it was losing money like crazy but they’re trying to make it profitable with ads. My

00:47:39.840 --> 00:47:45.060
theory is that it’s not profitable or MediaLab is just really trying hard to cut corners as much as

00:47:45.060 --> 00:47:50.700
they can by just not staffing effectively and not taking child pornography problems seriously. They

00:47:50.700 --> 00:47:56.100
only do the bare minimum just to maintain the app. To get more help, I called up my friend Katelyn.

00:47:56.100 --> 00:47:58.830
KATELYN: [PHONE RINGING] Hello?

00:47:58.830 --> 00:47:59.220
JACK: Hello.

00:47:59.220 --> 00:48:01.440
KATELYN: Hey, how are you?

00:48:01.440 --> 00:48:02.940
JACK: Great. Thanks so much for taking my call.

00:48:02.940 --> 00:48:04.320
KATELYN: Oh, no problem.

00:48:04.320 --> 00:48:09.720
JACK: This is Katelyn Bowden and she’s badass. In fact, she’s so badass she started something called

00:48:09.720 --> 00:48:15.420
the Badass Army which stands for battling against demeaning and abusive selfie-sharing. Basically,

00:48:15.420 --> 00:48:19.020
if someone takes your nude photos and posts them publicly without your consent,

00:48:19.020 --> 00:48:25.440
that’s a problem. It’s devastating and Katelyn has been helping victims of revenge porn for a

00:48:25.440 --> 00:48:29.460
while now by doing things like helping people get their images removed from the internet.

00:48:29.460 --> 00:48:30.180
KATELYN: Yes.

00:48:30.180 --> 00:48:33.660
JACK: Have you ever had to try to get images removed off of Kik?

00:48:33.660 --> 00:48:40.920
KATELYN: Yes. Actually, that was one of the largest platforms that we worked with

00:48:40.920 --> 00:48:46.860
‘cause there are so many different ways that these images are getting shared, and Kik is one

00:48:46.860 --> 00:48:53.100
of the platforms that people feel more anonymous on, so therefore they’re more likely to do this

00:48:53.100 --> 00:49:02.520
sort of thing. In the beginning it was almost impossible to get anything removed from Kik.

00:49:02.520 --> 00:49:09.960
Then for like, a few months, right in the middle – I want to say it was toward the end of 2018 or so

00:49:09.960 --> 00:49:15.060
– they were really great about responding. But it didn’t last really for very long at

00:49:15.060 --> 00:49:20.340
all. Suddenly everything just was going unanswered again.

00:49:20.340 --> 00:49:29.820
JACK: When you say responding, there’s – this is a non-consensual posting of a nude photograph;

00:49:29.820 --> 00:49:31.580
can you please remove it, and they would remove it?

00:49:31.580 --> 00:49:40.140
KATELYN: Yes, they would. Well, they would shut down the chat room that was – the picture was

00:49:40.140 --> 00:49:45.420
being shared in or they would shut down the user’s account that was sharing the image. Or

00:49:45.420 --> 00:49:53.820
if law enforcement was contacting them, they would respond with the information that they were asked.

00:49:53.820 --> 00:50:00.060
With Badass, we normally would use a DMCA. There was the copyright violation and

00:50:00.060 --> 00:50:03.660
they [00:50:00] just would shut down what needed to be shut down. It would remove the image.

00:50:03.660 --> 00:50:09.860
JACK: Okay, so at some point they stopped removing images for you.

00:50:09.860 --> 00:50:16.320
KATELYN: They stopped responding at all. There wasn’t even an easy way to get ahold of them.

00:50:16.320 --> 00:50:25.380
Suddenly the e-mail – the e-mail that we had been sending our DMCAs to was no longer active. For a

00:50:25.380 --> 00:50:30.660
while there was just no response at all. Then eventually things were getting bounced back.

00:50:30.660 --> 00:50:35.400
Then we found other e-mails for the company that had bought them and still just nothing.

00:50:35.400 --> 00:50:36.471
JACK: Okay, so…

00:50:36.471 --> 00:50:41.220
KATELYN: It was like we were just throwing these e-mails out there and nobody was reading them.

00:50:41.220 --> 00:50:47.660
JACK: That was a while ago. Here we are in 2021; are – do you think these images are still up?

00:50:47.660 --> 00:50:53.940
KATELYN: Well, actually, when you had brought up the subject of Kik with me,

00:50:53.940 --> 00:50:58.980
I was just curious; there was an account that I had used to infiltrate these

00:50:58.980 --> 00:51:05.400
picture-sharing groups. I haven’t used it in a while. I haven’t checked it in a while.

00:51:05.400 --> 00:51:13.320
But it got my curiosity going and there was a court case about a year back where

00:51:13.320 --> 00:51:19.860
the creep that had been sharing the images was found guilty and sentenced and part of my job with

00:51:19.860 --> 00:51:26.280
Badass was helping the victim clean up the mess now that it was no longer needed as evidence. So,

00:51:26.280 --> 00:51:32.220
out of curiosity, I went to that old account and I know that I had sent out DMCAs to get these

00:51:32.220 --> 00:51:38.580
images removed and then I just kind of – well, I was busy and I never really double-checked

00:51:38.580 --> 00:51:45.420
and triple-checked to make sure they were removed. Much to my dismay, they’re still up. These images

00:51:45.420 --> 00:51:55.260
are found to have been illegal. It’s not like this is just a copyright violation or anything

00:51:55.260 --> 00:52:01.740
like that in their eyes. These are images of a teenager that are still up and available.

00:52:01.740 --> 00:52:04.680
JACK: Well, specifically under eighteen.

00:52:04.680 --> 00:52:08.300
KATELYN: Yes, specifically under eighteen.

00:52:08.300 --> 00:52:14.340
JACK: This is really frustrating me. Kik has completely stopped removing revenge porn photos,

00:52:14.340 --> 00:52:19.980
too? Or not even respecting DMCA takedown requests? What the hell, Kik?

00:52:19.980 --> 00:52:23.940
KATELYN: Well, the issue is that if Kik knows that these images are out there,

00:52:23.940 --> 00:52:31.560
they then are obligated to clean them up. If they don’t clean them up and they know about it, then

00:52:31.560 --> 00:52:37.020
they’re in big trouble. So, what they’re doing right now is they’re turning a blind eye to it.

00:52:37.020 --> 00:52:41.580
They’re ostriching; they’re sticking their head in the sand and pretending this isn’t a problem.

00:52:41.580 --> 00:52:46.020
JACK: Yeah, good point there. If Kik doesn’t know this is going on in their chat app,

00:52:46.020 --> 00:52:49.740
that’s abhorrent. If they do know and they’re not doing anything about it,

00:52:49.740 --> 00:52:53.580
that’s also abhorrent. There’s no explaining the situation at this point.

00:52:53.580 --> 00:52:58.260
KATELYN: The issue is that Kik doesn’t moderate, okay? So, there’s nobody sitting there watching

00:52:58.260 --> 00:53:03.660
any of this stuff happen. Unless they are being made aware of the issue, they don’t know

00:53:03.660 --> 00:53:09.420
it’s happening. They’re in big trouble for not moderating at all ‘cause they’re allowing these

00:53:09.420 --> 00:53:17.520
illegal images to still be on their platform. But the issue is if they know about it and they still

00:53:17.520 --> 00:53:22.080
don’t do anything, then they’re in much bigger trouble ‘cause then they’re knowingly doing it.

00:53:22.080 --> 00:53:25.620
JACK: What’s so frustrating about all this to me is that Kik doesn’t

00:53:25.620 --> 00:53:30.240
seem to be held responsible for any of the problems that they’re allowing to happen.

00:53:30.240 --> 00:53:34.860
KATELYN: That is actually kind of a safe haven. I’m gonna say something that’s

00:53:34.860 --> 00:53:42.240
gonna be extremely unpopular because – and even I don’t like saying it. That is that, Section 230,

00:53:42.240 --> 00:53:48.360
it makes it so that the platform itself is not responsible for what the users do on it. If a

00:53:48.360 --> 00:53:55.140
user is committing a crime with the platform, the platform is not liable. Until a method is found

00:53:55.140 --> 00:54:01.860
to incentivize platforms taking the initiative to delete these images and to make sure that

00:54:01.860 --> 00:54:07.940
their platforms are moderated, then there’s no reason that they feel they need to do it.

00:54:07.940 --> 00:54:14.400
JACK: I’m getting really frustrated now. My palms are actually sweating. What does

00:54:14.400 --> 00:54:18.480
a person do when they get this frustrated? That’s it; I’m calling the authorities.

00:54:18.480 --> 00:54:22.800
JP: [PHONE RINGING] Hi, Jack. How are you?

00:54:22.800 --> 00:54:29.040
JACK: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. So, let’s start out; who are you and what do you do?

00:54:29.040 --> 00:54:35.760
JP: My name is JP Rigaud. I serve as a Special Agent for the Ohio

00:54:35.760 --> 00:54:43.440
Attorney General Dave Yost Bureau of Criminal Investigation. I’ve been an agent since 2012.

00:54:43.440 --> 00:54:48.140
JACK: Okay, so, I have a crime to report.

00:54:48.140 --> 00:54:54.060
JP: Oh, wait, you may have to talk to the police department for that, not me, but go ahead.

00:54:54.060 --> 00:54:59.940
JACK: Okay, well, there has been quite a lot of child

00:54:59.940 --> 00:55:06.180
[00:55:00] sexual abuse material on Kik recently and I don’t think Kik is moderating this.

00:55:06.180 --> 00:55:13.500
JP: We’ve wanted to – it probably takes up a significant portion of not just, I think,

00:55:13.500 --> 00:55:21.000
the time of the agents that I serve with but the agencies that we help out. Again,

00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:31.200
it’s – Jack, it’s fairly common that we are, in a sense, tackling these. But as you know,

00:55:31.200 --> 00:55:39.660
it’s the World Wide Web; it’s huge. It’s well beyond what any agency themselves can take on.

00:55:39.660 --> 00:55:44.400
JACK: JP went on to explain to me that whenever they receive reports of people trading child porn,

00:55:44.400 --> 00:55:48.480
they take it very seriously and investigate the person and make arrests whenever they

00:55:48.480 --> 00:55:52.920
find evidence. The reason why I called him is because he’s dealt with this exact case a bunch

00:55:52.920 --> 00:55:57.180
of times. He’s dealt with child porn issues in the past and arrested people. So, it’s true;

00:55:57.180 --> 00:56:02.520
they do take this seriously. As we heard earlier, there’s no shortage of news stories about people

00:56:02.520 --> 00:56:07.620
being arrested for trading child porn on Kik, which is good. Those people should be stopped,

00:56:07.620 --> 00:56:12.120
but I feel like the common part of this story is that Kik is seemingly permitting

00:56:12.120 --> 00:56:18.620
this type of activity. Is there some kind of legal trouble that they can get into for allowing this?

00:56:18.620 --> 00:56:25.380
JP: That’s a good question. I don’t know. It’s probably a little bit too

00:56:25.380 --> 00:56:32.160
big of a – I want to say something for me to put my hands around and really,

00:56:32.160 --> 00:56:40.380
I would need to really pull in some minds in the sense of prosecution, some legal perspective on

00:56:40.380 --> 00:56:49.860
– I’m not disagreeing with you that they should be about the work of making this a – how do I

00:56:49.860 --> 00:56:56.640
want to say it – a safer place not just for kids but for all of its users. But I don’t know that I

00:56:56.640 --> 00:57:06.300
could even speculate how that would happen. But when I hear you say what can we do, just keep

00:57:06.300 --> 00:57:13.320
reporting. I know NCMEC has been a fantastic organization. In a sense, many times you see

00:57:13.320 --> 00:57:19.860
these reports of the arrests and whatnot but many times it starts from them. In their history too,

00:57:19.860 --> 00:57:26.040
they were and they still are about the business of trying to protect and serve our communities in

00:57:26.040 --> 00:57:34.560
the sense of no, they’re not law enforcement but they have that drive to see something resolved.

00:57:34.560 --> 00:57:40.860
JACK: Okay, so his suggestion is to report this to NCMEC which is spelled N-C-M-E-C. This

00:57:40.860 --> 00:57:46.740
is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They run something called the Cyber Tip

00:57:46.740 --> 00:57:52.560
Line. The Cyber Tip Line was created by congress to process reports of child sexual exploitation

00:57:52.560 --> 00:57:58.380
and then take these reports and help enrich those databases of known child porn hashes as well as

00:57:58.380 --> 00:58:03.600
reporting it to law enforcement. This is probably where that PhotoDNA service gets its hashes from.

00:58:03.600 --> 00:58:11.940
The Cyber Tip Line puts out yearly reports on what it sees and in 2020 it received 21 million reports

00:58:11.940 --> 00:58:18.780
of child sexual abusive material. Wow, that’s a lot. That poor person who has to go through all

00:58:18.780 --> 00:58:24.660
of those reports must have no hope for humanity. But I’m digging into this report to learn more.

00:58:24.660 --> 00:58:29.820
There’s two groups of people who report to the Cyber Tip Line. The first is just regular people

00:58:29.820 --> 00:58:34.140
like you and me. If you see something, you can say something and tell the Cyber Tip Line.

00:58:34.140 --> 00:58:41.100
But in 2020 there were only 300,000 reports by the public, so where’d those other 20 million cases

00:58:41.100 --> 00:58:47.820
come from? The companies themselves who saw the explicit material on their platform self-reported.

00:58:47.820 --> 00:58:52.860
For instance in 2020, Facebook the company reported 21 million times that they saw child

00:58:52.860 --> 00:59:00.540
porn on their site. Google reported that they saw it 500,000 times. Imager.com also reported

00:59:00.540 --> 00:59:06.240
31,000 instances of child porn to the Cyber Tip Line. So, how many times did Kik report child

00:59:06.240 --> 00:59:13.260
porn to the Cyber Tip Line in 2020? Well, if I search for Kik in the report, it’s not present.

00:59:13.260 --> 00:59:19.260
But if I search for their parent company, MediaLab, it is there and it says they reported

00:59:19.260 --> 00:59:25.080
14,000 times to the Cyber Tip Line in 2020. But it’s not clear if that was for Yik Yak,

00:59:25.080 --> 00:59:30.600
Whisper, or Kik since they own all these apps. I asked NCMEC to clarify how many were for

00:59:30.600 --> 00:59:35.700
Kik specifically but they refused to provide extra detail. They’re super busy anyway. So,

00:59:35.700 --> 00:59:40.680
it seems like MediaLab is doing something but it just seems like the bare minimum here,

00:59:40.680 --> 00:59:45.540
like just enough to stay out of trouble or to be able to say in court yeah,

00:59:45.540 --> 00:59:48.780
we have filters in place and are actively reporting things to the Cyber Tip Line.

00:59:48.780 --> 00:59:54.360
But they can do so much more. They’re letting so much go through without any consequences to the

00:59:54.360 --> 01:00:00.840
users trading it. But are they in violation of any laws for permitting this activity? [01:00:00] That

01:00:00.840 --> 01:00:06.660
part I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer, but I do wonder about COPPA laws. This is the Child Online

01:00:06.660 --> 01:00:11.460
Privacy Protection Act and it was put in place to safeguard the data of children who are under

01:00:11.460 --> 01:00:17.520
thirteen. Now, in the terms of service on Kik, it explicitly says that anyone who is under thirteen

01:00:17.520 --> 01:00:23.160
is not allowed to use the service, but is that good enough? I mean, we clearly know there are

01:00:23.160 --> 01:00:30.900
kids under thirteen on Kik, but does Kik know that, too? In 2019, TikTok was under scrutiny

01:00:30.900 --> 01:00:35.220
for violating COPPA laws. They were illegally collecting personal information from children

01:00:35.220 --> 01:00:42.240
under thirteen and they agreed to settle a lawsuit and paid 5.7 million dollars as a result of this

01:00:42.240 --> 01:00:48.420
allegation. Surely if TikTok has been found to violate COPPA laws, then Kik must certainly be

01:00:48.420 --> 01:00:54.000
violating them too, right? How do you get the FDC to create a suit against someone? I don’t know.

01:00:54.000 --> 01:01:00.060
I suppose you’d have to start with evidence; screenshots, pictures, videos, chat messages.

01:01:00.060 --> 01:01:04.800
But there’s no way I’m going in there and collecting that. You kidding me? I know I don’t

01:01:04.800 --> 01:01:10.920
have what it takes. I think what we have to rely on is some watchdog group or government entity

01:01:10.920 --> 01:01:17.640
seeing the prolific problem that Kik is allowing and trying to bring them to court to prove what,

01:01:17.640 --> 01:01:22.500
though? That they’re negligent at fighting child porn on their app or even obligated

01:01:22.500 --> 01:01:28.380
to do that? Section 230 says the app itself isn’t responsible for something that the user does which

01:01:28.380 --> 01:01:34.260
might be illegal. It might be really hard to prove anything here, so if a group brings this to court,

01:01:34.260 --> 01:01:39.540
good luck. But that wouldn’t be the first time Kik would face legal problems. You already

01:01:39.540 --> 01:01:44.460
heard about their SEC lawsuit. Well, they lost that case which resulted in Kik having to pay

01:01:44.460 --> 01:01:49.380
a five-million-dollar fine. Or, I guess the Kin Foundation had to pay that. But even before that

01:01:49.380 --> 01:01:54.600
lawsuit, the parent company to BlackBerry issued a lawsuit against Kik saying they were infringing

01:01:54.600 --> 01:02:00.660
upon some BlackBerry copyright. Kik settled that lawsuit and paid an unknown amount, so you can

01:02:00.660 --> 01:02:05.640
see that they haven’t been the cleanest company legal-wise, but that’s just with Kik Interactive.

01:02:05.640 --> 01:02:11.220
What about MediaLab AI, the company that owns Kik now? Well, looking at PACER records,

01:02:11.220 --> 01:02:17.040
I do see a handful of lawsuits against MediaLab. One was a teenager who claimed she was sexually

01:02:17.040 --> 01:02:22.200
harassed on Kik and she was suing simply because the app didn’t warn parents clearly enough that

01:02:22.200 --> 01:02:27.420
pedophiles were active on this app. That case got dismissed. There was another lawsuit;

01:02:27.420 --> 01:02:32.220
it looks like WorldstarHipHop is saying that MediaLab published a copyrighted video. That

01:02:32.220 --> 01:02:37.860
one’s still going on, but there’s one more that’s pretty interesting. MediaLab owns Whisper which

01:02:37.860 --> 01:02:44.340
is a chat app, but I guess you can share secrets with others anonymously. Apparently in March 2020,

01:02:44.340 --> 01:02:49.200
a security researcher found that the Whisper database was sitting right there on the

01:02:49.200 --> 01:02:55.740
internet without a password. This left a lot of people exposed; aged and locations of users

01:02:55.740 --> 01:03:02.160
were leaked. If you looked at this database, there were 1.3 million users on Whisper who

01:03:02.160 --> 01:03:09.000
were fifteen and under. In total there were 900 million user records in this database breach.

01:03:09.000 --> 01:03:13.800
So, this resulted in a class action lawsuit where people were saying they were suffering damages

01:03:13.800 --> 01:03:19.320
from getting their data exposed like this. It should have been more secure. MediaLab did reach a

01:03:19.320 --> 01:03:23.520
settlement agreement and paid the victims for this but we don’t know how much was in that settlement.

01:03:23.520 --> 01:03:29.880
The victims were seeking five million dollars but it just doesn’t say what was agreed on. Oh,

01:03:29.880 --> 01:03:33.900
and if you read the app reviews for Whisper, it also looks like that app is not doing well,

01:03:33.900 --> 01:03:40.140
either. It seems like there’s lots of scammers on the app now and maybe even prostitutes. Users are

01:03:40.140 --> 01:03:45.300
reporting there’s just not good moderation taking place there. Yeah, it doesn’t seem like MediaLab

01:03:45.300 --> 01:03:50.160
is the cleanest company legal-wise either, and apparently not the most secure because

01:03:50.160 --> 01:03:55.260
of their Whisper database breach. But maybe there’s the Parler option. Remember Parler,

01:03:55.260 --> 01:04:00.600
that right wing social media app? Well, after the insurrection on the US Capitol in January of this

01:04:00.600 --> 01:04:05.160
year, Google and Apple told Parler they must moderate their content or they’ll be removed

01:04:05.160 --> 01:04:09.420
from the app stores. That was the line they drew; they had to moderate what was going on in the app.

01:04:09.420 --> 01:04:15.780
Parler didn’t moderate their content and so, they got kicked out. Perhaps Google or Apple should do

01:04:15.780 --> 01:04:20.640
the same with Kik. Say hey, you’ve got a real bad child porn problem going on here and you’re not

01:04:20.640 --> 01:04:24.600
working hard enough to fix it; either moderate or get kicked out. By the way, this wouldn’t be

01:04:24.600 --> 01:04:28.200
the first time Kik would be kicked out of an app store. They were first kicked out of the

01:04:28.200 --> 01:04:32.700
BlackBerry app store after their lawsuit with BlackBerry. BlackBerry really didn’t like them

01:04:32.700 --> 01:04:37.080
after that and they just removed them from the BlackBerry app store. Kik was also removed from

01:04:37.080 --> 01:04:41.700
the Windows Mobile app store. This one looks to be more voluntary, though. Kik was just done updating

01:04:41.700 --> 01:04:45.660
their Windows version and they’re just like, we’re just done with this. So, that’s two app stores

01:04:45.660 --> 01:04:50.460
they’re gone from, but they’re still present and available in two of the biggest; Apple and Google.

01:04:50.460 --> 01:04:55.440
I think Google and Apple here have a solid ground to throw Kik out of the app stores. I mean, it’s

01:04:55.440 --> 01:05:00.060
pretty easy to go into Kik and see for yourself all the child porn that exists in there. You

01:05:00.060 --> 01:05:03.900
might have [01:05:00] to trade some child porn in order to see all the rooms to prove it yourself,

01:05:03.900 --> 01:05:10.020
but once you do, you’ll be able to get access to rooms and see it for yourself. But is that

01:05:10.020 --> 01:05:15.720
going too far, ganging up on Kik and kicking them out? Yeah, it’s hard to know what’s right

01:05:15.720 --> 01:05:21.900
and wrong these days, but let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose this app had only one use

01:05:21.900 --> 01:05:27.900
which was to spread child porn. If 100% of their users were there just for that, would anyone have

01:05:27.900 --> 01:06:54.360
a problem kicking them out of the app store then? The question becomes how many bad users

01:06:54.360 --> 01:08:17.700
or violations does the app have to have before it can be considered for removal from the app stores?

01:08:17.700 --> 01:08:22.080
You know, when a bar that serves alcohol has too many reports of disorderly conduct,

01:08:22.080 --> 01:08:26.760
they can get their liquor license revoked, or if the bar doesn’t prevent illegal activities

01:08:26.760 --> 01:08:30.720
going on in the bar, they can also have their liquor license revoked. But there

01:08:30.720 --> 01:08:36.060
isn’t any clear rule like that with social media apps. The only way to get your app

01:08:36.060 --> 01:08:45.420
revoked is to have it removed from the app stores which are just private companies,

01:08:45.420 --> 01:08:55.680
and that’s putting a lot of burden on the app stores to figure out who should stay

01:08:55.680 --> 01:09:01.860
and who should go. It also gives them a lot of power, that they can just remove apps whenever

01:09:01.860 --> 01:09:22.260
they feel like it. But looking at the Google Play Store, there are clear guidelines that

01:09:22.260 --> 01:09:26.700
all apps must follow to be listed in their app store. Here, let me show you what they say.

01:09:26.700 --> 01:09:31.980
HOST4: Before submitting your app, ask yourself if it’s appropriate for Google Play and compliant

01:09:31.980 --> 01:09:38.040
with local laws. Our restricted content policies cover a broad set of topics. Child endangerment

01:09:38.040 --> 01:09:43.080
is never acceptable on Google Play. If an account is found to violate these policies,

01:09:43.080 --> 01:09:47.310
we’ll take action, including reporting the account to the appropriate authorities.

01:09:47.310 --> 01:09:51.660
JACK: Okay, so if the app is endangering children, then it’s not acceptable in the

01:09:51.660 --> 01:09:57.660
Google Play Store. But that’s not the intent or purpose of Kik. Any chat app can endanger a child,

01:09:57.660 --> 01:10:00.660
so I guess it comes down to what the users are doing in the app.

01:10:00.660 --> 01:10:05.280
HOST4: User-generated content hosted in your app must meet certain requirements

01:10:05.280 --> 01:10:10.440
including the implementation and use of content moderation and reporting systems.

01:10:10.440 --> 01:10:16.380
JACK: A-ha, there it is; user-generated content must be moderated or you can be kicked out.

01:10:16.380 --> 01:10:20.700
So yeah, that’s where I’m putting my finger, right there on that violation.

01:10:20.700 --> 01:10:25.080
But I think it still would be pretty hard to prove you aren’t moderating,

01:10:25.080 --> 01:10:30.840
because what does that even look like or mean? Blocking curse words in chat room names could

01:10:30.840 --> 01:10:36.300
be considered moderating and they do that right now, so what do they really need to do or change

01:10:36.300 --> 01:10:42.240
here and how would they be able to prove that to Google if Google was mandating they do this?

01:10:42.240 --> 01:10:49.980
It’s really tricky stuff. Also, don’t just take my word for this. Try this; Google the word Kik,

01:10:49.980 --> 01:10:55.260
K-I-K. Then click the News tab on Google so you see all news articles about Kik.

01:10:55.260 --> 01:11:02.940
I guarantee you the first three, maybe even ten pages of results are all about child porn on

01:11:02.940 --> 01:11:08.460
Kik. If all the news articles about your company are talking about child porn on your app, then

01:11:08.460 --> 01:11:13.560
that should be clear evidence that your company has a very bad child porn problem. Other major

01:11:13.560 --> 01:11:18.360
publications have highlighted this problem, too. There’s a Forbes article which is titled The $1

01:11:18.360 --> 01:11:24.480
Billion App Kik Can’t Kick its Child Exploitation Problem. That article was written in 2017, way

01:11:24.480 --> 01:11:29.280
before MediaLab even bought them, so this isn’t a new problem for Kik. There’s also a New York

01:11:29.280 --> 01:11:35.160
Times article which is titled The Wild, Popular App Kik Offers Teenagers and Predators Anonymity,

01:11:35.160 --> 01:11:40.860
and that article is about how two college guys coerced a thirteen-year-old on the app to meet

01:11:40.860 --> 01:11:45.840
them in real life, and then they killed her. If you Google other chat apps like WhatsApp,

01:11:45.840 --> 01:11:51.660
WeChat, Signal, you simply don’t see articles like this or articles about child porn almost at all.

01:11:51.660 --> 01:11:57.360
So again, this is more proof at how rampant the child porn problem has become on Kik.

01:11:57.360 --> 01:12:01.260
I want someone to investigate this further, to really know what’s going on,

01:12:01.260 --> 01:12:05.700
someone who has the teeth, who can actually make something change from

01:12:05.700 --> 01:12:10.560
all this. All I can do is underline and highlight that this is a problem,

01:12:10.560 --> 01:12:16.140
but nothing is going to actually happen from me talking about it on this episode. It’ll

01:12:16.140 --> 01:12:25.800
be someone else who actually has power to do something that will actually make a change.

01:12:25.800 --> 01:12:32.520
[MUSIC] That brings us back to Azrael. Azrael is the hero you didn’t know you needed. Remember last

01:12:32.520 --> 01:12:37.200
we heard he was just getting into using modified Kik clients to take over chat rooms? Yeah,

01:12:37.200 --> 01:12:43.440
well, he was doing good with that Kik clan and then he joined a new clan called Xensec. Now,

01:12:43.440 --> 01:12:46.200
because he was the new guy, they wanted him to prove himself.

01:12:46.200 --> 01:12:52.200
AZRAEL: What they wanted me to do was they wanted me to either

01:12:52.200 --> 01:13:00.660
bait somebody into proving themselves – proving to us that they’re a pedo or they wanted me to

01:13:00.660 --> 01:13:08.460
grab a pedo’s IP and basically [01:10:00] get all their ISP information and all that stuff.

01:13:08.460 --> 01:13:14.400
JACK: Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is the first time we’ve heard the word ‘pedo’ on here, on this

01:13:14.400 --> 01:13:19.800
interview, so was this the first time you’re experiencing that there’s pedophilia on – or…

01:13:19.800 --> 01:13:30.420
AZRAEL: It was the first time that I saw that pedophilia was a large-scale problem, yeah.

01:13:30.420 --> 01:13:36.900
Xensec focused solely on the pedophilia problem.

01:13:36.900 --> 01:13:40.140
JACK: So, okay, so when they said that to you, you must have been like,

01:13:40.140 --> 01:13:43.940
the what problem? How am I supposed to find these guys?

01:13:43.940 --> 01:13:52.860
AZRAEL: Kinda, yeah. It was like, alright, so how do I get a pedo

01:13:52.860 --> 01:14:00.720
to do this? At the time, I had a stanza that – I plug in my link

01:14:00.720 --> 01:14:08.760
to the stanza and it basically shows up on the receiving end as an invisible picture.

01:14:08.760 --> 01:14:14.700
Then they’re like, why isn’t this loading? They click it; I have their IP, get all their ISP

01:14:14.700 --> 01:14:25.440
information. So, that’s what I used. Basically what happened was one of our other members

01:14:25.440 --> 01:14:31.920
came in and dropped an @ of a known pedophile. I was like…

01:14:31.920 --> 01:14:34.260
JACK: You dropped a what? An app? An @?

01:14:34.260 --> 01:14:36.587
AZRAEL: An @, so, your…

01:14:36.587 --> 01:14:37.980
JACK: Oh, so it’s just your username.

01:14:37.980 --> 01:14:42.000
AZRAEL: …profile – yeah, dropped their username.

01:14:42.000 --> 01:14:46.800
I was like, you know what? Fuck it. Not doing anything. Let’s get this dude. [MUSIC]

01:14:46.800 --> 01:14:54.960
So, I dropped the stanza and then I said something to make it so he would open the chat.

01:14:54.960 --> 01:14:59.700
JACK: Okay, so a classic phishing scheme. He said something that he thought a pedophile would

01:14:59.700 --> 01:15:04.620
be interested in to get them to read his message. But that stanza of code he put in the private chat

01:15:04.620 --> 01:15:09.480
would collect more information on this person if they read the message. It basically tells the Kik

01:15:09.480 --> 01:15:13.800
client to reach out to a website for something and when the user goes to that website, Azrael

01:15:13.800 --> 01:15:19.440
can see what IP just went there and the IP can tell him what city and location this user is in.

01:15:19.440 --> 01:15:24.390
While you can use a VPN with Kik, I’ve been told that Kik just doesn’t work very well over VPNs.

01:15:24.390 --> 01:15:30.420
AZRAEL: Exactly. Let me tell you, dude, pedophiles will click anything.

01:15:30.420 --> 01:15:35.700
JACK: So, he collects this extra information on the suspected pedophile and then reports all

01:15:35.700 --> 01:15:39.300
of what he finds to the admins of this new clan that he’s trying to get into.

01:15:39.300 --> 01:15:40.800
AZRAEL: The admin’s like oh,

01:15:40.800 --> 01:15:44.660
you didn’t even tell us you were doing that. That’s great. You’re one of us.

01:15:44.660 --> 01:15:48.780
JACK: So, he was now in a Kik clan that specifically

01:15:48.780 --> 01:15:51.540
targets pedophiles and child-porn traders.

01:15:51.540 --> 01:15:58.020
AZRAEL: When I say pedophile, especially on Kik, I mean people that are sharing

01:15:58.020 --> 01:16:09.180
straight-up mega links to terabytes of CP. It’s just, it literally makes me sick to my stomach

01:16:09.180 --> 01:16:15.720
to think that this is out there. You know what I mean? People are exploiting children

01:16:15.720 --> 01:16:20.220
and people are paying for it and sharing it on a child’s app.

01:16:20.220 --> 01:16:25.740
JACK: [MUSIC] I’ve been the guest of honor in this clan. I’ve got to go in and check it out,

01:16:25.740 --> 01:16:29.640
and it’s wild. They’ve got bots that are there collecting all kinds of information,

01:16:29.640 --> 01:16:34.020
and any time the chat room finds a person involved with this kinda stuff or a chat room,

01:16:34.020 --> 01:16:38.760
they just feed it to the bot. The bot has a list of all bad actors in chat rooms and when

01:16:38.760 --> 01:16:43.080
the clan is ready to do a raid, they know exactly what channel to hit. Then the people in the clan

01:16:43.080 --> 01:16:47.520
will get their souped-up versions of Kik and go raid different chats in an attempt to take

01:16:47.520 --> 01:16:53.160
over the chat room and close it down. They all pile into a channel and then start spamming it.

01:16:53.160 --> 01:16:59.220
AZRAEL: So, there’s two different types of spam codes. There’s a QOS attack code which

01:16:59.220 --> 01:17:07.860
is literally just as much as you can pack into a single chat bubble. Then there is crash codes.

01:17:07.860 --> 01:17:15.300
Crash codes rely on actual zero-day exploits within the Kik system which

01:17:15.300 --> 01:17:19.020
will force-close your app if you look at the code.

01:17:19.020 --> 01:17:23.160
JACK: Now, they could use some tricks to try to take over the chat and close it down,

01:17:23.160 --> 01:17:25.260
or they could just try scaring people.

01:17:25.260 --> 01:17:30.900
AZRAEL: We rely honestly heavily on the fear factor.

01:17:30.900 --> 01:17:38.100
If somebody comes in and just spams your room and you don’t know what’s happening and their account

01:17:38.100 --> 01:17:46.200
looks scary and the bot they’re using looks scary, you’re just going to assume that person is scary.

01:17:46.200 --> 01:17:50.400
If you are forced to exit the chat,

01:17:50.400 --> 01:17:56.460
how did they do that? How am I gonna join back? What happens if I join back? You know what I mean?

01:17:56.460 --> 01:18:01.920
JACK: So, you’ve gone in and spammed lots of pedo rooms just – how many do

01:18:01.920 --> 01:18:05.700
you think your crew has spammed at this point, [01:15:00] or raided?

01:18:05.700 --> 01:18:12.540
AZRAEL: We have hundreds. I personally have only raided

01:18:12.540 --> 01:18:19.320
ten or so myself. I prefer phishing at this point, taking accounts that way,

01:18:19.320 --> 01:18:27.300
because if I log into an account, I am taking that account out of play. If he owns rooms,

01:18:27.300 --> 01:18:35.700
I can purge them. If he’s victimizing a child, I’ve cut contact. You know what I mean? But we

01:18:35.700 --> 01:18:43.020
have hundreds of rooms that people who are better at spamming and attacking have taken.

01:18:43.020 --> 01:18:47.640
JACK: I want to remind you that all this is done on mobile devices since Kik is

01:18:47.640 --> 01:18:51.060
just a mobile app. How many phones do you have?

01:18:51.060 --> 01:18:52.200
AZRAEL: One.

01:18:52.200 --> 01:18:53.760
JACK: You’re doing all this on one phone?

01:18:53.760 --> 01:18:55.200
AZRAEL: Yes.

01:18:55.200 --> 01:18:58.560
JACK: With multiple Kik apps installed?

01:18:58.560 --> 01:19:05.580
AZRAEL: I have – let me count my Kik apps for you. One, two, three,

01:19:05.580 --> 01:19:10.080
four, five, six, seven. I have seven Kik accounts…

01:19:10.080 --> 01:19:11.220
JACK: So, this must be…

01:19:11.220 --> 01:19:12.000
AZRAEL: …on this one phone.

01:19:12.000 --> 01:19:18.480
JACK: …each is a different APK ‘cause I don’t think you can make the same APK installed,

01:19:18.480 --> 01:19:19.080
you know…

01:19:19.080 --> 01:19:23.400
AZRAEL: Yes. Yes, so I have seven different APKs.

01:19:23.400 --> 01:19:26.700
JACK: So you have to have multi-task on your phone,

01:19:26.700 --> 01:19:29.688
like oh, let’s go to all these different Kik apps.

01:19:29.688 --> 01:19:29.700
AZRAEL: Yep.

01:19:29.700 --> 01:19:37.100
JACK: Oh man, that just must be like – that must be an evening.

01:19:37.100 --> 01:19:42.780
AZRAEL: It’s a lot to do all at once and every single time I raid,

01:19:42.780 --> 01:19:47.580
my heart is racing. It’s such a rush ‘cause there’s – you’re doing

01:19:47.580 --> 01:19:52.560
so much all at once and if you fuck up one little thing, your raid stops.

01:19:52.560 --> 01:19:58.440
JACK: Now, Doc, the guy trading this stuff on Kik, has seen these raids in his chat rooms.

01:19:58.440 --> 01:19:59.580
DOC: Yeah, multiple times.

01:19:59.580 --> 01:20:01.980
JACK: Of course, he finds it annoying.

01:20:01.980 --> 01:20:12.060
DOC: Usually it’s not that effective but I have seen sometimes where one person comes in,

01:20:12.060 --> 01:20:18.960
starts talking, being nice, and then they realize there’s child pornography in this room

01:20:18.960 --> 01:20:29.460
and they start sending very, very hateful messages almost as if a bot takes over,

01:20:29.460 --> 01:20:35.760
because they send it to a lot of people very, very quickly. Then they start spamming messages,

01:20:35.760 --> 01:20:43.800
often just some long copy-paste message they send over and over and over again.

01:20:43.800 --> 01:20:48.000
They get banned by the admin but then later, they join again.

01:20:48.000 --> 01:20:51.180
They shouldn’t be able to join because they’re banned but they do,

01:20:51.180 --> 01:20:55.860
and then they start spamming again. Then another person comes in and starts spamming, and then

01:20:55.860 --> 01:21:00.180
another person comes in and starts spamming. Then there’s usually three or four people at

01:21:00.180 --> 01:21:06.360
least that keep spamming and no matter what you do as an administrator, you cannot get them out.

01:21:06.360 --> 01:21:12.900
They keep being able to join for some reason, and then people start leaving because it’s annoying.

01:21:12.900 --> 01:21:21.840
Because even if you block this person yourself, you will still see that a message is being hidden

01:21:21.840 --> 01:21:26.520
from you, so you will still see these – ‘this person has been blocked’, ‘this person has

01:21:26.520 --> 01:21:31.200
been blocked’ filling up your screen over and over again, so the rooms kinda die from that.

01:21:31.200 --> 01:21:34.260
JACK: Has your account ever been crashed? Does

01:21:34.260 --> 01:21:40.140
your app crash sometimes or hang or you just can’t type anything anymore?

01:21:40.140 --> 01:21:45.300
DOC: My app didn’t crash but I know that a lot of peoples’ apps did.

01:21:45.300 --> 01:21:53.580
I think I was just generally using a good phone. People on iPhones usually had their apps crash.

01:21:53.580 --> 01:21:55.980
JACK: What a weird battle this is.

01:21:55.980 --> 01:22:01.620
AZRAEL: In my clan right now, we have literally thousands of chats,

01:22:01.620 --> 01:22:08.700
hundreds of accounts that need to be taken down. There’s only twenty of us. We can

01:22:08.700 --> 01:22:16.080
only do so much. It’s gotten to the point where I literally have nightmares about

01:22:16.080 --> 01:22:23.220
a child being victimized because I didn’t take out that chat or that account.

01:22:23.220 --> 01:22:30.000
JACK: I thought it was ridiculous to talk about chat-raiding clans at first. Then, I guess I

01:22:30.000 --> 01:22:35.520
still think it’s ridiculous. Like, what does this even matter, right? But now it looks like Azrael

01:22:35.520 --> 01:22:41.340
is a vigilante of some kind. He uses his raiding skills for good. He cares about combating child

01:22:41.340 --> 01:22:46.500
porn so much that he feels like it’s his duty to do something. He can’t just stop when he knows

01:22:46.500 --> 01:22:53.460
it’s constantly going on and no one is stepping up to fix this problem. Now, Azrael’s clan has of

01:22:53.460 --> 01:22:59.640
course reported numerous people and chat rooms to Kik. They say for the most part, Kik does not take

01:22:59.640 --> 01:23:04.620
action. If they do take action, it’s typically months later and then they might see a ban or

01:23:04.620 --> 01:23:08.820
a [01:20:00] closed channel. So, they’re doing their part by telling Kik about this problem.

01:23:08.820 --> 01:23:16.320
AZRAEL: Recently I tried to – so, I’ll grab somebody’s ISP information, run that through

01:23:16.320 --> 01:23:23.880
some tools to get as much information as I possibly can, and then I will drop that

01:23:23.880 --> 01:23:34.440
to the Federal Bureau of Investigations Cyber Crime Division which is absolutely scary to me

01:23:34.440 --> 01:23:44.340
because cyber-crimes. I’m firmly grey hat, so I could get myself in trouble.

01:23:44.340 --> 01:23:49.260
JACK: Yeah, I mean, what he’s doing is phishing people and doxxing them and he’s using a hacked

01:23:49.260 --> 01:23:54.420
Kik client that goes against the terms of use on Kik, too. I bet if Kik knew about the clan

01:23:54.420 --> 01:23:59.040
or Azrael, they would immediately ban them from the app because they’re breaking the terms of use,

01:23:59.040 --> 01:24:03.660
which is just ridiculous. Yes, the power they have can be used for something awful,

01:24:03.660 --> 01:24:08.220
but they’re using these powers to fight something much more awful on Kik.

01:24:08.220 --> 01:24:14.700
DOC: At a point, I kinda realized what I was doing and how bad it was,

01:24:14.700 --> 01:24:21.660
and I – well, really, I freaked out and I didn’t sleep for like, two whole days.

01:24:21.660 --> 01:24:33.780
In my sleep-deprived state, I sent an e-mail to you which probably looked kinda panicked in a way.

01:24:33.780 --> 01:24:47.040
It was, and I was – I needed a voice of reason, someone I trusted who knew sort of the inside of

01:24:47.040 --> 01:24:56.280
how different IT security things work and who knew the potential of me having the contacts I did, but

01:24:56.280 --> 01:25:05.580
also the danger of having the items. I was being – I’ve been told by you that I should delete them.

01:25:05.580 --> 01:25:09.540
JACK: Yeah, I said why don’t you just delete everything? Uninstall the app and stop?

01:25:09.540 --> 01:25:19.020
DOC: Yeah. In my power state, in the state of having that much power,

01:25:19.020 --> 01:25:26.580
it was tough. It was very, very hard to do because it felt wrong. I had worked very, very hard to get

01:25:26.580 --> 01:25:34.260
more than 8,000 items, items that I had catalogued in my head, so I knew them by heart. I knew

01:25:34.260 --> 01:25:42.840
so many things that I had, all these things, and people look up to me. I was being told to delete

01:25:42.840 --> 01:25:51.900
them, to throw away all this power. It took me three more days and I talked to a friend of mine

01:25:51.900 --> 01:26:01.160
whom I really, really trust about it as well. I ended up deleting it. I deleted everything I had.

01:26:01.160 --> 01:26:05.280
JACK: You think someone should just go shut this thing down like they did with Parler?

01:26:05.280 --> 01:26:16.260
DOC: I want Kik to shut down but I also want the police to actually utilize what is right in front

01:26:16.260 --> 01:26:26.280
of them. Kik is such an easy place to get – to spot and catch predators, but they aren’t being

01:26:26.280 --> 01:26:34.680
caught in there. Things are running rampant and they could use this tool at their disposal, but

01:26:34.680 --> 01:26:40.500
they’re not. While I want it to close, I also want it to be exploited by the police, so to speak.

01:26:40.500 --> 01:26:45.660
JACK: You might be wondering maybe this is some sort of honeypot set up by the police. Well,

01:26:45.660 --> 01:26:49.440
that’s actually happened a few times. There’s a Forbes article about a guy who was arrested for

01:26:49.440 --> 01:26:54.720
trading child porn on Kik. The police commandeered his phone and got access to his Kik account,

01:26:54.720 --> 01:27:00.540
but they didn’t delete it or shut it down. They made a deal with this child porn trader to keep

01:27:00.540 --> 01:27:06.960
trading on Kik so they could collect information on other Kik pedophiles. The guy made the deal

01:27:06.960 --> 01:27:14.280
and stayed on Kik trading child porn while the FBI watched over his shoulder. It’s weird and creepy

01:27:14.280 --> 01:27:19.440
as hell that this happened because this Forbes article says it’s not clear if the FBI actually

01:27:19.440 --> 01:27:25.020
caught anyone else from this operation. What’s more is that Forbes asked Kik about this operation

01:27:25.020 --> 01:27:30.240
and Kik had no idea there was an undercover operation going on in their chat app. So,

01:27:30.240 --> 01:27:35.700
this tells me Kik wasn’t working with the FBI on this one. All this is to say that yeah, while the

01:27:35.700 --> 01:27:40.680
police may be using the app to do some sort of sting operations, I don’t think there’s any major

01:27:40.680 --> 01:27:47.220
coordination between Kik and the FBI to conduct lots of sting operations or anything. If this

01:27:47.220 --> 01:27:56.160
is some sort of honeypot, it’s permitting quite a lot of vile stuff to get through the cracks.

01:27:56.160 --> 01:28:02.220
KATELYN: I absolutely do believe that Kik should be held to the same standards as every other

01:28:02.220 --> 01:28:07.020
social media platform, including Parler. If they’re refusing to moderate and refusing to

01:28:07.020 --> 01:28:13.140
remove illegal content, [01:25:00] then they don’t have a place among the app store if

01:28:13.140 --> 01:28:17.220
that’s the way that they want to do business.

01:28:17.220 --> 01:28:26.040
AZRAEL: I have really mixed emotions about that. This is my hacker origin story. I came from Kik.

01:28:26.040 --> 01:28:34.860
Everything I know came from Kik. To have it shut down would hurt me but after everything

01:28:34.860 --> 01:28:42.960
I’ve seen and everything I’ve experienced, I’m scared that there’s really no other way. I also

01:28:42.960 --> 01:28:52.200
strongly dislike the idea of the powers that be just flipping a switch. You know what I mean?

01:28:52.200 --> 01:28:59.340
JACK: No, I don’t. Why would that be a thing? I think it would shut down this whole system and

01:28:59.340 --> 01:29:00.060
that’d be great.

01:29:00.060 --> 01:29:08.640
AZRAEL: It would, but then that’s a scary line to cross, you know? With Parler,

01:29:08.640 --> 01:29:16.320
I never got on Parler, so I can’t exactly say they didn’t deserve it.

01:29:16.320 --> 01:29:24.300
But I don’t think anybody deserves it. You know what I mean? Nobody should be able to just flip

01:29:24.300 --> 01:29:48.240
a switch and just end things but in terms of Kik, I think that might be the only way.

01:29:48.240 --> 01:30:00.120
(OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you Azrael and Doc for sharing your very personal stories with us.

01:30:00.120 --> 01:30:05.760
Also, thank you to Katelyn Bowden and JP Rigaud for lending your voice and being part of this,

01:30:05.760 --> 01:30:11.760
too. If you ever encounter child porn yourself, please report it to the Cyber Tip Line which you

01:30:11.760 --> 01:30:18.720
can find at cybertipline.org. If you’re a listener all caught up and can’t wait for more episodes,

01:30:18.720 --> 01:30:24.120
then you must find this show valuable, so please consider donating to the show on Patreon. This

01:30:24.120 --> 01:30:27.960
will tell me loud and clear that you love it and want more of it, and it’ll give me

01:30:27.960 --> 01:30:34.380
the means to keep it going. So please head over to patreon.com/darknetdiaries and show your support.

01:30:34.380 --> 01:30:40.260
Thanks. This show is made by me, the leader of the operators, Jack Rhysider. Research and

01:30:40.260 --> 01:30:44.700
fact-checking by the disciple Sean Summers, editing help this episode by the pack leader

01:30:44.700 --> 01:30:50.340
Damienne, and our theme music is by the rust devil, Breakmaster Cylinder. Even though the NSA

01:30:50.340 --> 01:30:57.000
is one of the few government organizations that actually listens to you, this is Darknet Diaries.