It Could Happen Here - Are Overseas Nazis Recruiting Your Kids on Roblox?

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Molly talks about the recently unsealed case against the Albanian racist who recruited American teens in a Roblox chat to Zoombomb California city council meetings.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals.

You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Calls are media. Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, Call zone media. loving Zoom bombers, running a national campaign to disrupt public meetings. Those guys were mostly members of the Goyim Defense League, an anti-Semitic group of freaks who just love getting a rise out of people. They were calling themselves the City Council Death Squad, and they've disrupted hundreds of virtual public meetings from coast to coast over the last year. Everything from zoning boards in New Jersey to city council meetings in California, even dipping their toe into messing with online meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. They mostly seem motivated by their insatiable need to force strangers to hear them say the N-word,

but I do think they understand that their behavior limits people's access to local government. Many of the cities they targeted responded by ending virtual participation in government meetings. That means fewer people participate, it's harder to engage with local government, and people just generally feel less safe and less motivated to pursue the kinds of redress available to them through local democracy. And I'm glad we did the episode. I heard from people in maybe a dozen cities all over the country who found the episode online when they were trying to figure out what the hell happened at their own meeting. all over the country who found the episode online when they were trying to figure out what the hell happened at their own meeting. And the guys doing it liked the episode so much that

now they use my name when they call into meetings to scream slurs, which is a less positive outcome. But what can you do? I assume if the mayor of Redlands, California Googles me, he'll figure out I wasn't the one doing Holocaust denial at his meeting. But overall, this seems like the kind of thing that would be prosecutable, especially considering we know the real names of many of the group's ringleaders. Well, someone has finally been indicted for orchestrating hateful Zoom bombing in virtual city council meetings, but it isn't them. It's something much, much weirder. Last month, feds unsealed an indictment against a man named Mohamed Al Hashemi.

He's a Syrian national from Albania, currently living in England. And according to the federal prosecutor, he was the mastermind behind a Zoom bombing ring that targeted the Fresno City Council in the summer of 2020. He's been charged with one count of engaging in repeated harassing communication, one count of engaging in anonymous telecommunications harassment, three counts of a classic 18 U.S.C. 875C, transmitting threatening communications, and one count of conspiracy for doing all of the above, right? So there's a conspiracy,

and then those other charges represent the overt acts of that conspiracy. Now, again, I'm not a lawyer. I'll tell you that every time. I don't know all the laws. And so this is the first time I'm realizing that harassing someone by phone is a federal crime. I mean, it makes sense, right? Of course, that's illegal at the federal level too. I just didn't think about that the last time we were talking about Zoom bombing. I mean, the obvious charge is interstate threats. If you make a threat using a phone, the internet, or the mail, that's federal territory. But prosecutors are sometimes a little gun-shy about threats.

They want a slam-dunk case. They want a true threat, right? Something that is undeniably an actual threat before they'll bring a case like that. So I thought they'd have to get a little creative if they wanted to indict Zoom bombers. But if you're just talking about harassing phone calls, it's actually pretty straightforward to bring a federal case against the guys doing this. So two of the charges in the indictment

are for different subsections of 47 U.S.C. 223, obscene or harassing phone calls. Subsection A1C is making a telephone call or utilizing a telecommunications device, right? So that means it doesn't have to be a literal telephone. It can be a Zoom call. It can be any kind of telecommunications device, like text message, et cetera. Whether or not conversation or communication ensues, which means, you know, repeated harassing hang-up calls count too. You don't even have to say anything, without disclosing his identity and with the intent to abuse, threaten,

or harass a specific person, right? So this subsection is specific to the fact that they were using fake names. And then subsection A1E is making repeated telephone calls or repeatedly initiating communication with a telecommunications device during which conversation or communication ensues solely to harass any specific person.

Both of those counts carry a maximum sentence of two years, and they're usually just punished with a fine. Not that serious. The other counts are a little more serious. Interstate threatening communications can get you up to five years per count. And some of these calls had some pretty violent language. I'm interested to see how they move forward

with the threats though. The actual intent or ability to carry out a threat doesn't necessarily matter if the person the threat was made to was in reasonable fear from it. But I'm sure we'll see it argued that, you know, he was in Albania. He never planned to go to Fresno to hurt people. The obvious counter to that though is that he did literally say he was in Fresno and there was no obvious indication to the victims that that wasn't true. And he's also charged with conspiracy. The indictment refers multiple times to unnamed co-conspirators. So this isn't just one guy making racist prank phone calls. This is an organized and intentional conspiracy to engage in harassment and threats. That conspiracy is a little grim. The FBI and the UK's Metropolitan Police Force did find and interview at least nine members of the group they're saying al-Hashemi was leading.

And the reason they aren't named is because they are children. The children interviewed by the FBI had pretty consistent accounts once there was a federal agent in their living room telling their mom about the Albanian Nazi they'd been chatting with on Roblox. agent in their living room telling their mom about the Albanian Nazi they'd been chatting with on Roblox. Okay, not exactly Roblox, that's a little hyperbolic, but the raids were coordinated on a platform called Gilded, which is kind of like Discord and is owned by the same company as Roblox. So it's mostly used by gamers to talk about gaming, but also apparently for doing federal crimes. But the kids all said the group's leaders were users named Encino, that's I-N-S-E-E-N-O, not Encino like Encino Man,

the Pauly Shore movie, and Sapper. Many of the kids correctly ascertained that Encino, the user feds have identified as al-Hashemi, was older than they were and European, but spoke English very well. I went back and pulled the public

access TV recordings of some of those meetings and listened to the calls attributed to al-Hashemi, and he really doesn't have an accent that I could hear. You know, you don't gotta hand it to him or anything, but he does say the n-word like a red-blooded American racist, so I guess he had some practice. The kid interviewed by the Metropolitan Police Service at his parents' house in London said that Sapper was a college student in the United Arab Emirates. Although in the footnotes, the FBI agent indicates that actually Sapper is in Jordan, but, you know, close enough for a teenager. I can't find any information about whether or not charges are being pursued against that user, either in the U.S. or in Jordan. He isn't identified by name at all, but he does appear to be the only other adult

discussed in that document. The English teenager said Sapper loves spamming the calls they raid with ISIS gore videos. The criminal complaint details seven incidents of Zoom raids in June and July of 2020, five of which were meetings of the Fresno City Council. One was a Jewish religious service conducted by Zoom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the other was some random couple's wedding in upstate New York.

But the incidents described in detail in the complaint are clearly not the only ones that happened, just the only ones being charged at this time. When FBI agents interviewed a 13-year-old boy in Oregon, he told them the group's leader also enjoyed Zoom bombing parent-teacher conferences, year old boy in Oregon, he told them the group's leader also enjoyed Zoom bombing parent-teacher conferences, specifically at schools that had had past active shooter events. The boy said Encino, again that's al-Hashemi according to the complaint, loves to offend people and talks about racist things more than anyone else. But you know who doesn't love to offend people? The sponsors of this show. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series,

The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the

conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to post run high on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcastters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI

to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love

keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand And we are back.

I hope you enjoyed those products and services. Hopefully none of them were for online chat platforms where European neo-Nazis are recruiting your kids. All right. So all these criminal charges here are related to conduct that occurred in the span of less than five weeks, four full years ago. But for as long as it took to actually indict al-Hashemi,

it looks like the feds acted pretty quickly after the first few threats were made. They were sitting at the dining room table talking to a kid identified as RB by August 27th, barely two months after the call started. RB is described as a juvenile with a history of making threats who lives in Spartanburg,

South Carolina. Now, obviously, it's impossible to identify this minor and probably not a good idea to do, even if I could. I am dying to know what exactly that history of threats looks like. I found a couple of news stories in the year or two before this about teens in the Spartanburg area who'd been arrested for making threats. Now, obviously, again, even in those news stories, if a minor is arrested, they're not identified. So there's no way to sort of connect these two unnamed teens. But I did find a story about a ninth grader who posted a Snapchat on the day of the Parkland school shooting in 2018. It was a photo of the teenager holding a realistic fake gun with the caption, round two of Florida tomorrow. Again, it's impossible to say if there's any connection, but the general age, location, and interest in school shootings definitely caught my

eye. Another member of the group identified as a minor named C.G. in North Caldwell, New Jersey, sometimes used the name Adam Lanza during the Zoom raids, an homage to the Sandy Hook school shooter. And when the FBI was chatting with R.B. on August 27th, he told them about another user in the Discord who posted often about his desire to carry out a school shooting and wanting to kill. A few days after that, the FBI agents were sitting down with that 13-year-old boy and his parents in Oregon. That boy, identified as PM, told the agents that Encino wasn't just interested in Zoom bombing, but the group also doxed people, naming a bizarre list of targets ranging from Jewish leaders to yoga teachers and cooking classes. PM also told the agents that

Encino had doxed a former member of the group, a girl identified in a footnote as LT, after a disagreement over whether or not they should be using so many racial slurs in the prank phone calls. Now, I know I said it wasn't possible or even advisable to try to identify these minors, but it turns out it is possible and she's not a minor anymore. I don't know.

Maybe the rule is if you're old enough to drive drunk, you're old enough to get talked about on a podcast. She's got a court date coming up for a DUI arrest in April. The girl identified as LT was doxxed by the group's leader in July 2020, when she was just 16. And we only have that 13-year-old aspiring school shooter's word for it as to why she left the group. Maybe it is possible that she disagreed with the racial slur-heavy call scripts, but I don't think that's because she's not a huge fan of racism. She shows up that same year in leaked Discord chats from the

servers Groiper Haven and Nick Fuentes Unofficial, both servers for fans of Nick Fuentes. She identifies herself as a paleo-conservative Christian monarchist and claims to know Nick Fuentes. conservative Christian monarchist and claims to know Nick Fuentes. When another user asked her if she likes Nick, she says, yeah, he's cool. But she takes issue with the fact that he wants to marry a white woman because he is, in her eyes, not white and says, whites are better than any other race and we need to stay inside of our own race. A few sort of vestigial stitches of videos with her now-banned TikTok account show her in a Trump shirt and MAGA hat giving the camera this weird Kubrick stare as the text, girls that think communists should be jailed, appears over her head. You know, kids will be kids, right? Just classic kid stuff, wanting to imprison your political enemies and being really

opposed to race mixing. Well, last summer, she gave a speech about cancel culture to the Berks County Patriots, an anti-government extremist group that sent charter buses to the insurrection. And public records show she received a stipend as a legislative intern at the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The teenage griperiper-to-legislative-aid pipeline is something that should concern us all a little bit more. But doxing LT seems to have frightened some of the other kids. PM, that's 13-year-old in Oregon, told agents he was worried the group would dox him if he tried to leave. BO, a minor in North Carolina, told agents he believed Encino had access to his computer via spyware. AM, a 17-year-old in Maryland, provided agents with screenshots showing Encino had posted his

address and discussed having him swatted. And this is such a messy, ugly thing, right? So first of all, these are kids. They're kids, right? One of them is as young as 13. And that has to be front of mind in all of this. But even if they lack the frontal lobe capacity to really understand the consequences of saying you're going to kill someone, this isn't just normal kid acting out behavior, right? PM told other users he wanted to shoot up his school. AM posted often about wanting to build bombs and blow things up and expressed a lot of interest in ISIS. They were all calling into these meetings and saying the most shocking, upsetting things they could think of.

And it's not 100% clear why, right? Like they didn't all necessarily have the same motivations or understandings. A teenager identified as K.H. told agents, the goal is to create such a disturbance that the hosts have no choice but to terminate the meeting hurting people's feelings along the way is completely in bounds and the slurs were just a means to that end he said they would quote just have fun in there am told agents he was just posting, quote, random things, but he also admitted he hates Jews.

And so maybe it's a meaningless exercise to try to nail down exactly how ideologically committed these teens were to this project of racial and religious harassment. But al-Hashemi is also not the first Nazi to see the value in recruiting teens online. They may just be kids talking shit right now, but if you hear a kid talking this type of shit, don't brush it off, right? This starts somewhere. This edgy, shocking, unserious sort of 4chan style racism crystallizes into serious ideological

commitment for some of them. And I hope these kids' parents were able to provide some meaningful intervention after they found out what their kids were up to online. And back to that timeline, right? So the indictment only lists the June 2020 calls as the overt acts of the conspiracy. But the date range for the charged conduct is actually May 2020 to February 2022. And maybe that means they plan to introduce additional evidence of other calls to support the conspiracy claim. It's hard to say. They're being pretty tight-lipped about it. Reporting by Jason Kobler for 404 Media says the Department of Justice declined to comment on the possibility of anyone else being charged.

And the criminal complaint goes into some detail about interviewing multiple cooperative minors. But it is possible the records they got back from these various platforms led them to other co-conspirators who are old enough to catch a federal charge. There are a lot of details missing here that we'll just have to wait for. The docket shows that Al Hashemi has retained an attorney. I assume they wouldn't have unsealed the indictment if they didn't have him in custody, but there's no information available about when or where he was arrested and how that extradition is coming along. And it's interesting to me how incredibly similar the MO is in this case to the ring led by the Goyim Defense League guys. I mean, it's not exactly a complicated plan. It's not

hard to believe that racists who never met each other would independently arrive at the same gross way of bothering people. But take, for example, one of the incidents in the indictment. A man that they allege was al-Hashemi called into the Fresno City Council meeting on June 11th, 2020, during public comment. He pretended to be a local resident named Brian, and he started off pretty normal, saying, you know, I agree with the previous speaker. He's sort of indicating that he's interested in and engaged in the topic of the meeting. He expresses an opinion about the topic at hand, which happened to be police funding. of the meeting. He expresses an opinion about the topic at hand, which happened to be police funding. And then suddenly he pivots to a violent call for murder of Black residents and repeatedly uses the N-word. And so after that call ends, the council's on high alert for disruptive callers. So subsequent

members of the group don't bother with a script or a backstory. They just start shouting slurs the second they connect until they're booted from the call, right? So in this case, the caller after fake Brian was that minor from South Carolina. And when his call connects, you can hear him laughing and he just says the N word and they hang up on him. I don't know, maybe I'm too hung up on the structural similarities here. I guess that's just classic crank call procedure, right? You start off with a reasonable ruse, you get the person you've called to believe this is a real normal phone call, And then you shock and upset them by making a hard right turn into the, I guess you can't really call it a punchline if it's not funny, but you know what I mean. But if you took the names out of this indictment,

you could mistake these descriptions of calls for city council death squad scripts. But they didn't start doing their Zoom bombing until the summer of 2023. And according to this indictment, the FBI agents were having uncomfortable conversations with teenage boys all the way back in 2020. So I think if there was any overlap between these two Zoom bomb rings, we'd know by now.

I think this is just unrelated racists reaching the same horrible conclusion. But if those guys are listening, I hope they hear the significance of that timeline. Within weeks of that first Zoom bomb in this indictment, they had search warrants for the homes of two of the minors on those calls. I think a lot of people assume that if they don't get caught, they aren't going to get caught. You see that a lot in tax evasion cases, right? After you do it a few years in a row,

you figure they're never going to get you, so you keep doing it, you get a little bolder. But they're just taking their time and building their case. Just because you haven't been caught yet doesn't mean they don't know you're doing it. So who knows? Maybe we'll see a similar indictment against the GDL guys a few years after they started doing it. There's not really a button to put on this one. We'll have to wait for more filings in Al Hashemi's case

to learn anything more there. But if you know any teenagers, check in with them. Make sure they're actually playing Roblox and not being coaxed into doing federal crime by a Nazi in Albania. You know what? Better yet, go outside. Unplug your router. Be free. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals.

You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.

Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories,

combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.