Our mission is to expose bullies,
pedophiles, racists, scammers, and trolls.
He’s a TikTok crusader taking down one troll at a time.
He goes by the name the Great LonDini.
I didn’t realize until I looked around social media
and uncovered how much vitriol there is,
how much hate there is.
The man is a mystery to his more than 3 million followers,
only seen in masks and in silhouette.
If we’re coming to expose you to your parents or to the police
or your employer,
it’s because you’ve already crossed a line.
There’s no stepping back over it.
So those of you who still believe you can harass the innocent,
you may want to check our videos.
If we catch you playing a stupid game,
you will win a stupid prize.
[Super_Users]
[TikTok’s Masked Vigilante]
I’m Leo.
I founded the Great LonDini movement to hunt down bullies, pedophiles,
racists, scammers, and trolls,
and to make the online community safer.
Internet trolls and keyboard warriors
have long been a problem on social media,
but a former marine on TikTok
is determined to be their worst nightmare.
The Great LonDini says he can expose the identity
of almost any cyberbully.
He does it with the help of
20 of the top cybersecurity experts in the world.
One of my most viral videos was of a man
who told a police officer to end his own life.
I mean, I don’t like criminals.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to go wish death upon them.
And I went through to find out who it was,
and it was a lawyer or someone who had just passed the bar.
Would you hire a lawyer that made this comment about a police officer?
Neither would we.
So what should be done about it?
I always think of the issue as
an issue amongst mostly adolescent children who are just immature.
I didn’t understand how somebody so educated
would say something so disgusting.
If we know that it’s somebody who’s underage,
the major goal, really the only goal is finding their parents.
If we can't find their parents for whatever reason,
but we do know the general vicinity of where they live,
we’ll contact the school district or school principal,
and we’ll let them see the information that we have.
This comment is unacceptable.
The child that made it was counting on remaining anonymous.
But not with us around.
We emailed his parents and school principal.
We do know that some children have been expelled from the school
because of some of the things they’ve said and done online.
About 40 percent of the time, we’ll get a response back,
and the majority of the responses that we get back are,
“I didn’t know,” very apologetic.
So I would say a good 50, 60 percent is all apologetic and thankful,
and the other 40 percent is more what you would expect
from someone who raised a child that would be acting that way.
Our mission is to educate people about
everything you say and do on the internet,
you may not think it has any consequences or any adverse effects,
but it does, and people are taking their lives.
We’re trying to do that in the best way humanly possible
without violating any guidelines.
Of course, TikTok keeps moving the target.
We were banned nine times.
This recent account that I’m on right now,
I’ve had it for a little under three months.
If you add up all the followers we’ve had,
we’re a little bit over 11 million followers so far.
The event that got me involved with what I’m doing is,
in 2020, I had a friend call me and tell me that his son,
who was autistic,
took his own life as a result of being cyberbullied.
The last message he received
was about 45 minutes before he took his life.
He asked me, “How hard would it be
to find the people that were harassing my son?”
So I went online,
I looked at the accounts, I get the phone,
I looked at all the messages,
and I was able to track down, I believe,
about seven different individuals,
and it turned out that those individuals did go to his school.
I found the parents of the kids, and I gave that information to him,
and for him, even though we only got responses from two of the parents,
he feels like it gave him some closure.
It made me feel like, you know, if I can do something,
I have to do something.
I have to try to help more fathers who are suffering like my friends.
I’m the person that doesn’t want you to come home to your child
and discover that they took their own life
because of online bullying.
If that makes me a vigilante, then so be it.
The Great LonDini isn’t a person.
There’s several people.
We had 20 people when I started, and now we have a lot more.
I've been in the cybersecurity industry for over 20 years,
so when I reached out for help,
I reached out to the people who I knew, and they were all high up.
When I say high up, we’re talking about people at Microsoft,
we’re talking about people within
the cybersecurity industry for the government
that are really the top ethical hackers
and computer engineers in the world.
The age range will probably vary between in the 60s
down to roughly 27.
They kind of walked me through it,
“If this is what you are going to do,
this is how you would do it legally, ethically, and smartly.”
When we track somebody down who’s committing a crime
or harassing somebody online,
it’s mostly information they published about themselves.
For the most part, it’s just simply opening up their profile,
looking to see who they’re following,
looking at their Instagram,
so it’s just a simple online search a lot of the time.
We have on our website
a list of rules that we ask people to follow.
The core tenets are: don’t bully the bullies,
never dox,
and never harass, right.
There have been a lot of times where people will use the name LonDini
as the sharp end of the stick—
“If you don’t stop harassing them,
the LonDinis are going to come after you,”
or LonDini army, LonDini this.
It doesn’t exist.
We’re basically the technical equivalent of mall cops.
We observe something, and we report it.
If we’re coming after you
or trying to expose you,
it’s a foregone conclusion.
We’re not going to threaten you. there’s no buyout.
Let this be a lesson. No mercy.
That I know of, two people have been fired.
If it’s a crime
and we can figure out who that person is,
we will make an anonymous tip
through the police department’s tip line
and let them have all the information that we have,
how we came to that information,
and then let the police take it from there.
At the end of the day, our only goal is to get the information
into the hands of the people who need it.
We had a video of a veteran
who somebody asks them to take their own life,
and obviously the video was devastating to me.
And for me, I wanted--
Everything in my body was like,
“Let’s make this guy a public example of if you ever do this, you know,
harm’s going to come your way.”
But at the end of the day, we can't, right?
But even though I wouldn’t do that, I did do a video, and I said,
“Listen, we know who you are,”
and I did know who he was because I actually talked to the veteran,
and the veteran said, “Hey, I know who this guy is.
He’s been harassing me.”
We were able to track the person down, but that was it.
We said, “We know who you are, stop.”
And we were hoping that would be a deterrent for other people.
But that wasn't enough for some people.
So a lot of people, including people that claimed to be LonDinis,
went and found somebody who has a similar name
and put their name on the internet.
Several users have intended to dox this commenter.
This resulted in an innocent man being harassed.
This is the reason why we never post private information publicly.
His job was threatened, his life was threatened,
so I had to go on to the account again
and make another video saying,
“You’re not the judge, you’re not the jury,
you’re not the executioner.
You have to let the people responsible handle these things
and stop presenting things as facts
because you’re going to get people either fired, hurt, or killed.”
I have read the content moderation guidelines religiously on TikTok,
and I don’t violate them.
I just don’t.
They change from time to time, but every time they change,
I read them, and I stay within the rules.
So again, I don’t know why.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that
they don’t like me calling out the problems.
I’m a constant reminder that there’s absolutely no way to moderate
millions of hours of footage,
and there’s never going to be an end game for that.