It started out with things like “scammer” or “thief” posts
saying that I had stolen some database
and I wanted US$200,000 to give it back.
But then it started to progress,
and I think by about 2018,
they then became more “pedophile,”
“you’re members of the sexual deviant organizations.”
So when I actually saw her photo on the blog,
it was like a lightning bolt.
Just suddenly it all came together that it made sense it was her.
I’m Guy Babcock, and this is my story of being the victim of
an online attack campaign,
calling me a scammer, a thief, a pedophile.
[Super_Users]
[Falsely Accused: The Victim of a Troll]
End of September of 2018,
I got a call from my father in Canada, and he was very upset.
He’s part of a social club for seniors,
and quite a few of the directors of this club had got an email saying,
“Did you know that you have this person in your club
whose sons are on the internet, and they’re both pedophiles?”
So I immediately then went to my computer,
and I started searching my name,
and just tens, if not hundreds of different links came up.
And so you’d have all of these pictures,
which clearly were stolen from my Facebook or LinkedIn account,
and then someone had written, you know,
“thief” or “pedophile” or whatever on top of the picture
so it just jumped right out at you as soon as you looked at it.
I remember being just overwhelmed when I first looked at this.
I felt, I guess, completely helpless
because I just couldn’t think of how can I possibly get rid of this.
How can I possibly answer something like this?
People can look at the sites and say,
“Well, it maybe doesn’t look right,” or “It looks a bit fake.”
But the point is, there’s always a doubt in the back of their mind.
And I just couldn’t imagine
how I was going to deal with it at that time.
I searched for myself, and I searched for my brother
because we were both mentioned in the original email.
I then started searching immediately other family members
and basically was able to ascertain that it was 11.
There’s somewhere around 640 posts that we’ve identified against me.
The posts started in 2016,
so they’d actually been up about two years.
The posts with my family members were of a similar pattern.
The women were all “thieves” or “scammers,”
and the men were all labeled as “pedophiles.”
Within about ten days of this coming up,
I got a call from a close friend of ours
from the village we used to live in,
basically saying that someone in the village
had approached him to say,
“Did you know this is on the internet?”
So actually, my worst nightmare came true within ten days.
You know, it caused a lot of stress for me at that point
because I’m thinking, “They’re also checking up on me.
Am I going to be refused a mortgage?”
This actually did occur to my brother in Canada.
They actually, when they went for a mortgage,
actually got refused a few times with no explanation,
which there was no reason.
And finally, I think it was the third mortgage lender
actually called them and said they had found the stuff online
and wanted to know about it.
The way I was actually able to figure out who was behind the post,
I decided to basically search my name
and look at every single link in the first 50 pages.
And as I went through and I got farther down,
I eventually came across a comment on a blog.
It had a fake name, but it actually had a photo of the poster.
And when I looked at the photo, I realized that I knew the person,
and it was Nadire Atas.
That was basically sort of a defining moment.
I still can remember that very vividly
because when I actually came across that,
I basically sat there in shock for about a minute or two.
She had actually worked for our family’s business.
We owned a real estate company, and she was a real estate agent.
As time went on, you know,
we started to get more and more complaints about her
from other agents.
And eventually in 1993,
we terminated her contract with the company
after finding some irregularities.
She had called and threatened my father,
and we had created a police report.
Several years later, when my mother died,
not long after, family members received letters in the post
saying horrendous things about my mother and her death.
But when this actually came up,
I think although I maybe for a second thought of her
because of the similarity to the attacks by letter,
it had been so long.
I mean, we’re talking more than 20 years ago.
I just dismissed it because, you know,
why would someone come back 20-some years later and attack you?
It just didn’t make sense.
So when I actually saw her photo on the blog,
it was like a lightning bolt.
Just suddenly it all came together that it made sense it was her.
Once I’d traced that, I then searched that person’s name
and came across a blog by a lawyer in Toronto.
And reading the blog, I realized that she and her family
had been attacked in the same manner that we were.
And once we contacted her,
we actually then found out that there was, in fact,
many, many victims.
At the moment, we’re aware of 150 victims,
but I suspect the number is actually higher than that.
We began a legal lawsuit against her in October of 2018.
We only had a judgment of our court case a couple of weeks ago,
so it’s been two and a half years since we began the legal process.
Once we got involved legally in a lawsuit
to try and get this stopped,
the posts have just increased exponentially,
particularly this last autumn.
It’s only now that we’ve finally been able to get the police
to engage and arrest her.
I also went to Google,
but I have to say that the process was extremely frustrating.
I even got an email back at one point
where they said they would consider removing the links,
but would I please provide when I got out of jail
and what the conditions of my release were.
At which point I went ballistic and said,
“This is the reason why I’m asking for it to be removed.
I’m not the criminal. I’m the victim.”
One of the problems that I’ve got as far as getting posts removed
is that the posts were put on websites that are in America.
These sites are basically “pay to remove.”
I call them extortion websites.
They allow people to post whatever they want
with little to no verification of the poster.
And then if you ask to have it removed,
they basically hide behind Section 230,
which basically means that the publishers
aren’t liable for what’s posted.
However, if you pay them a fee,
sometimes the fee was quoted as high as US$2,000,
they’ll consider removing the post.
If I was in the same room with her, I would probably just ask her, “Why?”
Why she has so much hatred for everyone.
I mean, people can have a tough life.
We all have things that we have to deal with,
but to lash out particularly against people she didn’t know
and had never met.
Something’s definitely wrong here, and it needs to change
because in my case, it’s clearly illegal in Canada;
it’s clearly illegal what has been posted,
and we have no mechanism really to get this removed
without the large corporations deciding that they’ll help us or not.
And I don’t think I should have to
go begging to them to get this removed.