The Binge Cases: U R NEXT - U R NEXT | 3. Unprisonable. Untouchable.

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

The perp Sergeant Finley’s tracking is convinced he can’t be caught. And now he’s not just targeting female gamers anymore. He’s on a rampage; terrorizing schools, theme parks, supermarkets. Nobody is safe. Want the full story? Binge every episode of U R NEXT ad-free now by subscribing to The Binge+. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to GetTheBinge.com. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at Patreon.com/TheBinge. U R NEXT is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Novel. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I sold my car in Carvana last night Well, that's cool No, you don't understand It went perfectly Real offer, down to the penny They're picking it up tomorrow Nothing went wrong So what's the problem?

That is the problem Nothing in my life goes to smoothie I'm waiting for the catch Maybe there's no catch That's exactly what a catch Would want me to think Wow, you need to relax I need to knock on wood

Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's lamated Okay, yeah, that's good, that's close enough Car selling without a catch Sell your car today on Carvana Pick up fees may apply Listen to every episode of You Are Next, add free right now when you subscribe to The Binge.

You'll hear the entire series before anyone else. Get exclusive bonus episodes and unlock more than 60 other true crime podcasts. Just head to The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and tap subscribe, or visit getthebinge.com to listen wherever you are. To Binge, feed your true crime obsession. The Binge Imagine you're in Disneyland. You're with your family, surrounded by thousands of other people. The California sun is warm on your skin, shrieks of laughter echo,

as people loop-de-loop on huge roller coasters. Magic is literally all around you. The Disney kind, anyway. It's a place where dreams come true, where you momentarily forget your problems, gorge on overpriced churros, and walk a marathon's worth of steps as you skip from one ride to the next. The happiest place on earth, where nothing bad could ever happen.

It's January 25, 2014, about 4.30 in the afternoon. A couple miles away is the Park's customer call center. It's one of those days where all the phones are ringing off the hook. I literally had just gone from one phone call to the next. This is someone we're calling Luke. He's a manager at Disney's call center. He wouldn't normally be on the phones, but there's a real rush on. When the phone queue got kind of crazy, I jumped in and just started taking phone calls to help out.

I just answered the phone. I guess information ticket sales. And the first thing that he said was, there's a bomb at Space Mountain. And it took me a second to process what he had said. I'm sorry, where did you say it was? And he said, it's in Space Mountain. I have tons of friends that are working there right now. Fearful for all the guests in the park.

Imagining how many people were probably there at the time. Luke swallows his fear. He breathes deeply, tries to push away thoughts of his friends and customers in danger, and remember his training. Keep the guy on the phone for as long as you can and get as much information as possible. Kind of like what the protocol had said. Every time I started asking him questions, I could tell he was getting irritated.

And he would just say, There's a bomb there. You need to do something about that. While he was talking, I was hitting that emergency button on our phones to let the resource desk know. And, of course, that emergency button on my phone wasn't working. And so I stood up and I was like waving my hand to try to get their attention. Eventually, another manager notices Luke's panicked signal

and rushes over. Luke's still trying to keep the caller on the line. I tried to get specifics out of him. I was like, well, where in Space Mountain? Is it in the queue? Is it somewhere in the attraction? Like, where is it? The caller then tells Luke it's not just one bomb.

It's four. He's placed two of them inside the attraction and two outside. He also says he's staying in a nearby hotel. Luke tries to stall for more time. He asks the caller which hotel he's staying in. He got fed up with all my questions. That's when he just hung up. There was police on scene almost immediately.

Disneyland can have up to 85,000 visitors at any one time. Space Mountain is in a part of the park called Tomorrowland. It's one of the most popular attractions in the park, tucked far away from any of the entries or exits. They ended up evacuating all of Tomorrowland. 10 to 20,000 people probably had to be evacuated. The police won't want to cause panic or shout about multiple bombs. They'll want to keep the crowd calm as they evacuate as quickly as possible.

But the visitors in the park must know that something's seriously wrong. Thousands of people terrified and confused, rushing to escape. Memories of terror attacks at concerts, marathons flashing through their minds. Once the cops have finally cleared the area of panicked families, they send in trained bomb detection dogs to sniff out the scene. But after a full sweep, they make the same realization that Sergeant Ben Finley did. It's all bullshit. My immediate reaction was relief, just being happy that nobody got hurt.

And then more anger after that, why would you want to cause panic for no reason? Luke doesn't know it yet, but he's been duped by the same online criminal that Ben is busy tracking across the USA and beyond. One kind of person does that, especially in the amusement park that has so many people in it who are there for only one reason, and that's to have a good time and enjoy stuff with their family. It does make you wonder, is he trying to see what he can do to get the most bang for the buck? I mean, is he tired of just individuals? is he trying to reach out on a broader scale and create more havoc?

What's the motivation of this guy? I wonder that, too. What would drive this perp to move from swatting an individual person to terrifying and traumatizing thousands of people in one fell swoop? In order to figure that out, and more importantly, to catch him,

Ben's going to have to roll up his sleeves and really get to work. From Sony Music Entertainment and novel, this is You Are Next. I'm Lee Alexander. This is episode three. Unprisonable. Untouchable. It's around early spring 2014. Ben's been trying for weeks to find information on the guy who attempted to swat the family in John's Creek back on January 25th.

When he called and said he'd planted multiple napalm bombs in their house, house. When Ben got on the case, one of the first things he did was subpoena Skype for information on the phone number this swatter used. Those call logs are how he discovered the Disneyland swatting that happened on the same day as the one in John's Creek. A few weeks on, Ben is in his office still drowning in those Skype call logs. It was an absolute boat load of data that they sent me and I was like, oh God, I spent the next, I couldn't tell you how many hours and days going through that entire thing. And it kind of overwhelmed me and I said, I got to figure out what I'm doing here so I can see it because I've got to visualize stuff. So I had a big whiteboard in

our conference room and I went down in there and I just drew like little squares. I said, all right, here's today's time. Here's the phone number. I got this. All right, I went from here to here. When in doubt, analog it out. That should be Ben's motto. Nobody was holding my hand, nobody was guiding me. I was learning by the numbers as I went. Slowly but surely, it starts to pay off. Ben's making more and more sense of this mountain of data before him.

He starts building a database, every place that got hit by this guy. Oh, there's my guy's number right here. There's my guy's number right here. There's this number again. Artie's calling this number, this number, this number, this number. Turns out Space Mountain was just the tip of a very large iceberg. Snuck's supermarket in St. Charles, Walmart in West Hills, California, Walmart and Simi Valley, called him bomb threats. Ben calls up every single place on this list. All of them had been swatted.

Pine Valley Middle School, San Ramon, called in a bomb threat to the school, cleared the whole school out. Domino's pizza in San Ramon, he ordered a absolute ton of pizzas in this place one night to ship somebody. and that's just one page. God knows how I made this guy I did. I'm sure the sky's the limit. Scouring through the logs, Ben sees that the guy he's after definitely isn't just focusing

on specific personal targets, people in their homes. He made more than 100 calls on a single day. Nobody and no place is safe. In the middle of it, when I'm going through these huge phone logs, I'm noticing a lot of administrative line numbers for government agencies. 555-4,000 or 555-2,000.

That's normally like a law enforcement agency switchboard line. Ben thinks back to the first swatting he worked, how the caller used the admin line to be connected through to 911 dispatch. He knows this is a swatting tactic because calls to the cop's non-emergency line are harder to trace. He had called Fairfax County Police in Virginia, Ogden Police Department in Utah, Toronto Police Department, San Juan Quine Sheriff's Office, Alpharetta Police Department, Missouri, Jackson County Sheriff's Office in Missouri, Racing Police Department in Wisconsin, Waterloo Regional Police in Canada, and Boston Police Department in Massachusetts. Tons of different agencies. Did this guy call every one of these places? Ben knows that each and every one of these calls made to those police switchboards was a different story.

swatting attempt. A hundred different tales of gruesome murders of bombs planted around neighborhoods. Countless families ambushed with an army of machine gun-wielding cops breaking down their front door. The scale of this is beginning to dawn on Ben. The guy he's after is clearly on a rampage, and Ben needs to stop him. So I started calling these different numbers, and I would get to their investigations and I was like, hey man, did you guys have a false 911 call or a hoax 911 call on this day and time at somewhere in your city or your county? And they're like, well, you know about it. I'm investigating one in my jurisdiction. I have a phone law here and it absolutely shows your number on this particular date and time and that's probably going to be the same

individual. When I was calling these guys and asking about this, I say, do you have audio of the person that called and they're like, yeah, I was like, can you share that with me? But I play mine. I said, Tell me if this sounds like your guy. I just shot my parents with a loaded AR-fif. I'm going to go to my other neighbors, and I'm going to shoot up the entire block. I'm going to go to a high school, and I'm blowing it up, ma'am. What you're hearing are reenactments of real calls,

all made by Ben's perp to different police stations all across the USA. And if I see any police, I'm killing the policeman, shooting a police in the head. And I got... That sounds exactly a bit like him. Okay. We may be owned to the same guy. At this stage, Ben probably knows more than any other cop in the U.S. about this swatter. But even then, it's not much.

Ben's only a few weeks into his investigation at this point. It's months yet before Esther will be targeted. So Ben's pretty much in the dark. Still trying to build a profile of this mystery swatter, figure out what kind of mindset he's going up against. He can tell, the voice that he's not dealing with a fellow Southerner. He also knows from those FBI bulletins that the profile of a swatter usually fits a teenage gamer. And someone who's got this

much free time to call this many places definitely doesn't seem like they're an adult with a full-time job, responsibilities, and, you know, a life. But other than those assumptions, Ben doesn't have anything concrete, nothing that can help him track this guy to guy down and uncover his identity. Luckily, that's about to change, with a little help from some friends up north. If you want a deeper look behind Cut, Color, Kill, now is the time. Join our free newsletter at patreon.com slash the binge, and you will get exclusive story details you can't get anywhere else.

Again, join me at patreon.com slash. The binge. That and obviously the iconic accents of Fargo. Hey, they said they were going to the Twin Cities. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, is that useful to you? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Something else you think of is them just being plain helpful. It's literally called Minnesota Nice. Ben's still making his way through the list of police precincts his perp has called. I'll make a phone call up to the Burnsville, Minnesota Police Department. Ben gets a detective on the phone named Brian. He breaks down what he's working on, how he's tracking this swatter, who seems to have targets all over the country.

He plays him a clip of the January 25th John's Creek call. I have four B-118 thermobaric napalm bombs. Now I have them all set on a timer. They go up and exactly... And as soon as he heard it, he goes... He's Canadian. I said, why he goes. I know how Canadian's talk,

but I'm around them all the time. Minnesota sits. right on the border with Canada. Well, fantastic, Brian. I appreciate you, buddy. What did I tell you? Minnesota nice. Finally, Ben has got his first real clue to this swatter's identity and his location. Along with a library's worth of call logs, Ben also gets a username and email associated with the Skype account of his swatter. Both have the word doxing in them.

Doxing, meaning posting someone's personal and private information online, like their home address, for example, which leaves them wide open to swatting attempts. Ben investigates this doxing email address, and it leads him to a website with a username plastered across the top. Ben clicks on the about section, which reveals something interesting. I'm a 16-year-old system administrator, security researcher, and software engineer. Location, Canada.

Currently unemployed. A teenager, check. Canada. Check. Ben can feel a hunch forming in his gut. The website links to a Twitter account with the same username. That Twitter account is where Ben strikes gold.

As he scrolls, Ben seeing confession after confession. I just swore to a Cupertino address. if anyone wants to listen to the radio. Or more accurately, this guy's bragging. Should I live stream myself swatting people? In an hour or two, I'm going to live it up and swat like 60 places. Ben's certain this is his perp. His email and social accounts are linked to the Skype number

that's made countless swatting calls. And here he is not only openly admitting to swatting multiple people, but saying he'll live stream it too. seems like he wants credit from fellow gamers who'll get a kick out of watching his chaos unfold. Ben can't believe he's being so brazen, admitting to the countless crimes he's committing

and the victims he's targeting. It's like he's purposefully waving his behavior right under the police's nose. So Ben keeps digging. He wants to find out if anyone online has been talking about this guy. I kept seeing his name pop up here. Send his name pop up here.

Ben finds post after post from different social media accounts, all of them talking about this guy only by his username. They know who this individual is. A lot of the gaming platforms he would be on there playing with him. And if he got beat, it would put him into a psychotic fit. He would go crazy. That's when he would turn his wrath upon them and try to figure out who they were and destroy them and to destroy their website or hack their Twitter profile or whatever he could

do, he would do to inflict his pain and anger out on them to try to exact some type of revenge for losing the game. These posts from other users talk about how the guy bends after has a habit of targeting young female streamers in particular, how he would harass them constantly, docks them, send pizzas to their houses and swat them. Exactly what he'd go on to do to Esther, who woke up in the middle of the night to a cop standing over her with an automatic weapon. The posts also talk about how he brags openly about what he does

and how much he loves the attention it brings him. I don't want this podcast to give him the attention he so obviously craves. So my production team and I are making a conscious choice not to tell you his real username. But we are going to call him something, and with everything we know about what he's done, to Esther and to countless others, we're going to choose something fitting.

We're going to call him Vicious. So Ben's got a website, a username, and some social media accounts, but he needs more. He needs to find out Vicious's true identity. I would get on some of these different message boards that these kids have, that they put stuff on there. Like, you know, they would docks each other and put all their information on there, and this is so-and-so, and this is so-and-so. Ben sees a post on the message board. It's all text.

It talks about a teenager. from Canada, and it lists a bunch of usernames and aliases, including the one on Vicious's website. It also includes a bunch of email addresses linked to Vicious, which Ben has seen before. That's what I have on my list. I wonder if this is my guy. Ben keeps reading, his eyes widening with each line. In amongst all the emails and social media accounts, this post lists a full name, date of birth, and home address. Ben might have just found his swatter's true identity, but he knows he can't rely on some posts on a message board as proof. It's basically hearsay.

He needs more. So he heads a little further up north, searching for some Canadian nice. I called the RCMP up there. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, aka the Mounties. Ben's hoping they can give him the inside scoop on Vicious. Maybe he can even convince them to join his investigation,

or launch one of their own. He's going to need Canadian authorities' assistance to take this case all the way. Ben outlines his investigation to the Mounties. He shares his hunch that this Canadian teenager is the person behind the vicious persona, as well as the evidence he's been collecting of the harassment and swatting of gamers all across the U.S.

I said, this is who I think he is. When Ben gives them Vicious's real name, he can tell the Mounties know who he's talking about. But the officer on the other end of the phone is tight-lipped. He's like, No, I can't tell you anything about that individual. Ben doesn't think the Mounties are just being deliberately evasive. Our criminal evidence procedure is different from the states.

This is Gary Young. He's a staff sergeant within the RCMP. Our level of standard of charge approval, they are a really, really tall order. Like, we needed statements from the victim, right? some counties or some smaller town, a police officer himself, would just write a report and that's a statement and that would be good enough. But what's good enough for the USA is not always good enough for Canada. I understand that potential frustration. I truly understand that. It's like, how do you tell somebody that's been tying their shoes?

They were like tying it with a double knot is good enough. Then all of a sudden double nodding your shoe, it does the job. The shoe stays on. but we need it in a bow to meet our threshold. Ben doesn't have everything tied up in a bow. He's got a knot of evidence tied up with his own hunches. One of the other biggest obstacles to sharing information is Vicious's age. He's a minor, so he's afforded special privileges. Since he's a juvenile, they were like, couldn't tell me anything. Ben can sense that he's on the right track,

that Vicious is the 16-year-old who was doxed online, and that he's also firmly on the RCMP's radar. But because he doesn't have the cold, hard proof that Vicious and this 16-year-old Canadian are one and the same, the RCMP's hands are tied. The RCMP aren't allowed to share what they know about an underage suspect, particularly across international borders,

even to a fellow law enforcement officer like Ben. What's worse, Vicious seems to know this too. Another of his tweet says, American police won't do shit. I'm unextraditable, unpresentable, untouchable. I felt the disappointment kind of roll over on me. Because when I told my boss, he came over, he's like, what do you got?

I said, I think this son of a gun lives in freaking Canada. And he's a juvenile. He just laughed. He goes, there ain't shit you can do about that, man. Ben's going to see about that. He might be down, but he's not out yet. I never liked losing. You know what I mean?

I never liked having bad people beat me, no matter if it was in the Marine Corps, whether it's in law enforcement. He starts looking back through Vicious's Twitter feed to see if he's made a mistake. Let the mask slip somewhere. And as Ben scrolls through the brags and the vitriol Vicious likes to post, he notices something really fucked up. I started finding all these pictures of these young girls. Young girls with Vicious's username scrawled across their foreheads in black marker. I was like, what is that about? I kept going and looking and finding more and more and more stuff.

I find out just what an absolute animal this guy is. The 2006 Chevrolet Equinox awarded the most dependable compact SUV in the U.S. by J.D. Power is designed for your everyday. And with available all-wheel drive, you can handle your to-do list with total confidence. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. Details at J.D.Power.com. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter, update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything

you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. When Ben first sees picture after picture of teenage girls posted all over Vicious's Twitter, he can't wrap his head around it. But it soon becomes all too disgustingly clear. He had somehow hacked into their eye cloud or something like that and got all their pictures on their phone.

He would go in, call these girls and threaten them. I'm going to release all your information, all your pictures, and all your nudes and everything else. I can only imagine what it was like for them the first time that happened to them because they're probably in a room by themselves, sitting there with their headphones on doing something, and all of a sudden this rando person shows up on your screen, and then next thing you know, they've hacked into your account.

It's designed to obviously put fear in a lot of people. Ben tells me, Vicious coerces teenage girls into sending him photos of themselves with his username written on their foreheads. Even worse, Vicious also coerces them into sending nude photographs directly to him. If they didn't cooperate, he would just unleash holy terror upon these people. And they would do it to try to get this animal to leave them alone.

Now, did that stop him? No, because he'd turn around and post all the crap out anywhere. This one girl, he took all of her pictures that were in her phone, and some of those were, unfortunately, for her, semi-nude photographs of herself that she'd sent to boys and whatnot, and he sent it to everyone in her contact list. People in her family, her grandmother,

people at her church. So imagine everybody that you know it's in your contact list got a semi-need picture of you today. How would that wreck your life? And these are 15-year-old girls we're talking about. These aren't grown women. These are little girls.

Ben tries to reach out to some of these young girls, but often they're too terrified to talk to him. They don't want to risk more retaliation. I can understand how weary they are and how shell-shock they were just going to not answer anything I sent to them no matter what I sent to them. This is something my team and I experienced while making this podcast too. So many of Vicious's victims don't want to risk talking about what they've been through. Some are still scared 10 years on that he'll come after them for speaking out and some just don't want to relive it all again. but dozens of them have the same stories.

Harassment, threats, abuse, followed by coercive promises that it would stop if they sent him photos of themselves. And whether they did or didn't, he would find a way to violate them anyway. One young woman who didn't want to be interviewed for the podcast but did share information with us told us that vicious first followed her on Twitter and then became obsessed with her. He hacked into her Skype account and added about 20 people. to a video call. Through her webcam, they were able to see her changing. Her bedroom was being live streamed. As Ben digs deeper, he sees Vicious is publicly bragging about everything he's doing to his victims. If you see some of the things he types, some of the things he says and how he speaks to these

girls, he's just a vile, nasty animal. Vicious isn't hiding his degeneracy. He's reveling in it. I'm a fucking pedophile who attempts to elicit nudes from every girl I come into contact with regardless of age, including my sister. This could be just another example of vicious courting notoriety and attention to the point of insanity, whatever it takes to further his extreme reputation. But it's clear to me that vicious is a predator, a young one but not any less dangerous for that fact. How funny would it be if I posted nudes on her own Twitter? No amount of talking nice to this person's going to work.

No amount of, hey, man, you need to stop. It's going to work. All that's going to do is motivate them to go even further. This guy was literally just absolutely taking great pleasure and glee at doing what he was doing to these girls. I have two daughters. And if this guy had done something like this to my daughter, I want to go find this guy and grab him around the neck and beat him stupid.

Golly, that just, it angered me. to no end. So I didn't give a damn if he lived in Canada or not. I said, I'm going to do everything I can to do something to this guy. On the next episode of You Are Next, Sergeant Ben Finley is ready to go to war. But while he's only just figured out what kind of guy he's dealing with, I've discovered that vicious's trail of destruction and degradation started months before January 2014. I was an earlier victim. He was watching all of streams to look for information of something he could exploit. Although Vicious's targets haven't been waiting around for a cop like Ben to fight their battles.

They've been busy figuring out Vicious's tactics. We found out information because of these other girls in their efforts. And they're fighting back for themselves. The community helped punish bad players. Don't want to wait for the next episode? You don't have to. unlock all episodes of You Are Next, early and ad-free right now by subscribing to the binge podcast channel. Search for The binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. Not on Apple?

Head to GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or GetTheBinge.com to learn more. This is You Are Next, an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, hosted by me, Lee Alexander. Lee Meyer is our senior producer.

Verity DeKala is our assistant producer. Sandra Schmuelli is our editor. Production management from Cherie Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolf. For novel, our executive producer is Max O'Brien. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis

and Jonathan Hirsch. Story development by Nell Gray Andrews, Willard Foxton, and Selena Mehta, who is director of development for novel. Special thanks to Carolyn Sher Levin at Miller-Korznik-Raman LLP, and to Ford Collier, who performed the Woodwind for our theme music. And a big thanks to the whole Sony music entertainment team. Three decades ago, a young woman named Angie Dodge

is found brutally murdered in Idaho Falls. Police put a man behind bars. But as the years pass, doubts emerge about whether the real killer was ever caught, that's when Angie's own mother embarks on a decades-long mission to uncover the truth. Listen to The Snare, a new series from ABC Audio. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.