In my writing this week about the sexual extortion of Amanda Todd by an online blackmailer, I connected a man named by the New Jersey sect of Anonymous (which, by the way, suddenly appeared on the internet in the wake of Amanda’s suicide) to a horrifyingly wretched group of mentally ill pedophiles that convince young girls to strip on webcam, and then record it. Then they use this footage to blackmail the girls into providing them – and a large audience of paedophiles who follow the blackmailers’ conquests – with further strip shows, which they continue to record. While the mainstream media has failed to catch up to this story with the level of detail and attention it so desperately deserves, they have been very eager to follow Kody Maxson out of his court appearances for “unrelated… charges of sexual assault and sexual interference with a minor” and discuss the Anonymous leaks that blame Kody and a man who goes by the screen name “Viper” for Amanda’s suicide.
After further investigation into this emotionally exhausting and highly disturbing world of online blackmailers, I have found that this community not only follows and shares the screen captured images and videos of these girls, but monitors internal rivalries among the blackmailers. This competition has led me to question whether or not Kody is the sole perpetrator in Amanda’s blackmail, and has made me realise the size and depth of this horrible online culture.
Videos by VICE
The article I published on Wednesday reported that Kody Maxson (who is known online as Kody1206) blackmailed an underage girl named Peyton, as detailed in a video from a series called the Daily Capper. If you haven’t read that article, the Daily Capper is basically an online newscast for the pedophile world, hosted by a news anchor developed using footage from the kids’ show Crashbox, speaking with a dubbed-over computerised voice. Amanda Todd, who was known to this community for singing on webcam, appears in a Daily Capper video published on December 19, 2010.
In a video from October 31, 2010, the anchor reports: “Peyton claims that she is free of her blackmailer’s clutches. She went on BlogTV earlier this week and shared her story with the world about how Kody blackmailed her.” Peyton told her side of the story in a video the Daily Capper ran, which was recorded off of BlogTV: “A month ago, he recorded me for the first time and then I was stupid enough to keep doing it because he said he was never going to do it again… and he didn’t want to ruin our relationship.” It is this deception of an underage girl that won Kody the “Blackmailer of the Year” award from the Daily Capper. In that video, Peyton describes Kody’s actions over a chilling, electronic musical score that was added in for effect by the Daily Capper: “Now I know that everyone that told me that he was like, a sick paedo that records girls, were right. If he threatens me I can just threaten him right back.”
Kody Maxson has told the mainstream media that someone with the username Viper, who New Jersey Anonymous is also after, is to blame for Amanda Todd’s blackmailing. In a Daily Capper video from December 5, 2010, the newscaster discusses the relationship between Kody and Viper: “Many have been saying that Viper has always been a role model for Peyton’s blackmailer, Kody1206. It seems Kody was also working to win ‘Blackmailer of the Year’ by screening caps of Peyton on BlogTV.” Evidently, Kody and Viper were very much aware of each other, as they travelled online in the same paedophiliac circles, and if this video is correct, Kody saw himself as Viper’s apprentice.
In an email I received yesterday, an anonymous reader showed me a profile that Kody Maxson had registered for what appears to be a site that enables Halo players to join up in teams and compete against each other. If you look at his profile right now, you can see that his username on the site is Kody. The official administrative posts from the site are credited to a “Kody” as well, which suggests that he may have been running this gaming site.
However, in the Google cache version of the “Kody” profile from August 29, 2012, the username is “Viper”, though it was registered under the email address kody.maxson@gmail.com.
While at first glance this seems to suggest that Kody and Viper are the same person, it would imply that Kody Maxson actively maintained two separate online identities that were treated as individual personalities by the Daily Capper. While this is indeed possible, it seems unlikely, and the IT security expert who has been helping me with this investigation agreed. In light of the Daily Capper revelation that Kody looked up to Viper, it isn’t terribly surprising that he would use his hero’s name on an unrelated internet community, as some twisted symbol of respect.
The December 5, 2010 video goes on to describe, in explicit detail, what Kody broadcasted on BlogTV. The main anchor cuts away to an animated man in a suit, sitting in a late night TV-style set. This reporter, grinning from ear to ear, relays what Kody did with Peyton’s screen-capped sex videos on BlogTV.
“This Monday night, someone played Kody’s Peyton caps on BlogTV. The first account was quickly banned, but whoever was behind it came back soon after and linked us to a Tinychat room, as it had not been created. This reporter was first on the scene, and found himself being room moderator. The first part showed Peyton in bra and the other in panties, obviously capped during different times. After the video ended, Kody cammed up in audio only mode, but for some reason, didn’t say anything. For unknown reasons we moved to a second Tinychat chatroom, where a video showed Peyton rubbing her pussy under her panties. It lasted up until the room was banned. We returned to the Tinychat chatroom, only to find a fuming Peyton demanding to know who had played her videos and threatened to call the police. The room was banned shortly after that. Peyton later went on BlogTV to talk about what had happened and admitted to the facts seen in the videos, but claims she never got naked for Kody. Some hours later the mysterious capper returned to BlogTV, to claim all Peyton vids. It became clear near the end that it had been Kody all along, since his… cam feeds went back and forth between his desktop, MSN conversations and the blog chat.”
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As the blog Hypervocal mentions, a Daily Capper video from November 7, 2010 shows Peyton chatting with Viper. She is stunned to learn that Viper is 41 years old. Shocked, she says: “Seriously? And… you wanna see a 14-year-old girl ‘bate? My dad’s a cop, so you shouldn’t be telling me that… He’s already caught like three paedophiles on BlogTV before.” Then she yells for her mother.
It is important to note that New Jersey Anonymous’ initial reports of Kody Maxson being 32 are wrong. As Lisa Rossington from CTV tweeted at me, and as BeforeItsNews has published from British Columbia court records, Kody Maxson’s year of birth is 1993, making him 19 now and a legal adult in 2011. My own attempt to find Kody on British Columbia’s criminal search engine was unsuccessful, possibly because his charges were dismissed.
There is a third player in this ring of paedo blackmailers who goes by several screen names including r0, r0ra and izq. In a series of screenshots that I saw, Peyton and Izq are shown having very graphic cybersex in a room of 90 other idle onlookers. Obviously Peyton and this Izq/r0 person were, or still are, engaged in some kind of relationship. The Daily Capper’s Halloween 2011 video describes Peyton and r0ra’s horrifying romance as well: “In what was one of the major shockers earlier on this year, Peyton became dedicated to being the biggest camwhore of the year. She has done numerous shows both in public and one-on-one for r0ra. According to her, the police got involved at some point. That obviously did no justice as she is obviously still active on Chateen and in an on-and-off relationship with r0ra.”
In addition to r0’s public relationship with this underage girl, he has also been accused by a blog called Anon Pass for “recording a 12-year-old girl who killed herself.” This is not in reference to Amanda Todd. It also claims that pictures of r0 carving Peyton’s name into his arm exist, and shows r0 on the cover of something called Loli Magazine. The cover of the magazine says: “Scoop – Paedo r0ra owned by 14-year-old.” Loli appears to be the magazine version of something like the Daily Capper, though I could not verify its existence beyond this blog post, or track down any actual issues.
It also seems that r0/r0ra has had a past rivalry with Viper. In the Daily Capper video from December 5, 2010 the newscaster describes the “annoying” competition between r0 and Viper to get the most votes for a Daily Capper award. This is the segment that immediately precedes the newscaster’s comments on Kody’s idolisation of Viper.
So, Kody1206, aka Kody Maxson, is heavily documented for blackmailing Peyton. Viper, who Kody has blamed in the mainstream media for Amanda’s suicide, is described by the Daily Capper as a role model for Kody. In light of r0’s public relationship with Peyton, it doesn’t require a strong imagination to consider the possibility that r0 threw Kody under the bus for Amanda Todd’s suicide in retaliation for his blackmail of Peyton. Kody, in a panic, might then have thrown Viper under the bus in order to get out of the spotlight. These are all hypotheticals, but regardless of what actually happened, they’re all horrifying creeps.
No new Daily Capper videos have been published to their YouTube channel since Halloween 2011. In their last YouTube video, they address their apparent disappearance between late 2010 and Halloween of 2011: “Honestly, we weren’t planning on bringing this series back at all, but it has come to our attention over the last nine months that we have been deeply missed within the community.” They go on to report on the advances of screen-capping culture since they had last made a video, as they describe a chat site called Dialogoo and their strategies for screen-capping their “targets”: “It’s all about moving a target from one website to another… Dialogoo became the new TinyChat for a while. Hidden rooms with random numbers and almost no bans. It has been used as a meeting grounds and a place to bring in targets.”
They also describe a chat site called Chateen, which is “all cam whores and cappers.” They say that if you’re a hero, which I presume means someone monitoring these rooms to try and get them shut down, “being in this room will give you nightmares.”
Clearly what we have here is a very disturbing and tangled web of paedophiles who are preying on young girls while spectators watch the dramatics as they unfold. While it is still not clear who blackmailed Amanda Todd, searching for the answer to that question inside a tangle of perverse storylines has begun to illuminate the larger issue at hand. This advanced form of paedophilia is driven by a highly sophisticated online world with its own media and its own celebrities. This seems to add a layer of entertainment for these people that thinly glazes over the reality that young, impressionable and insecure girls are being exploited, tormented and blackmailed.
This needs to stop before another girl is lost. Unfortunately, the dedication and organisation of this community, plus the sheer amount of people involved, make it very likely that it will only become more dangerous as the internet evolves. To stop this, law enforcement agencies will need to develop a greater sense of technical sophistication than these predators and the mainstream media will need to advance their painfully shallow understanding of this situation.
