I know for certain
that something is wrong with that individual
and that person will do it again
and possibly even escalate and move on to people.
So, my name is Deanna Thompson
and you may know me as Baudi Moovan
from Netflix's Don't F**k with Cats.
For people like me, you wanna figure things out,
you can't just let things go.
You become almost obsessed.
Where it becomes like a living and breathing thing
that you need to get answers for.
So you have to be like really careful
not to get too attached.
You also have to be really careful
not to like accuse people publicly.
Like, that's really dangerous.
You can't start throwing
accusations out against people
because you don't know
who's at the other end of the keyboard
and you don't know their mental state.
We do everything like super private.
We don't post public information
unless the person has basically
been convicted at that point.
We don't really do that at all
because you just have to be so careful.
We witnessed it first hand.
I've experienced my own danger
with being a web sleuth
and even though it was nothing,
it scared the crap out of me.
And the danger would come in
a couple of different ways, I think.
One is, the person or thing that you're investigating
finds out that you're investigating them.
And then they start investigating you.
So like, the tables are turned now
and everything is now focused on you.
And that's a dangerous thing
because the people that are doing these crimes,
most of the time, they want attention.
And what better attention to be like
"I'm killing these kittens…
how great would it be if I killed the person
that's investigating me killing these kittens.
I'll get a lot of press for that."
But then another thing that's dangerous
is getting too invested in it.
You know, there's a quote that Luka often sent to me.
Luka is the person that we were looking at,
that was in the documentary Don't F**k with Cats.
And I don't remember the exact quote
and I'm sure you guys can edit this
and look it up and put it on the screen or something,
but it's the abyss quote by Nietzsche,
it's the, you know "If you stare too long at the abyss,
the abyss stares back at you."
So he was like, recognising
that I was getting too invested in finding him.
And would often tag me on like a 4chan or 7chan post
and be like "Baudi Moovan,
the longer you stare at the abyss,
the abyss stares back at you."
And every time that happened
I would be like fuck he's right.
I need to step away for like a couple of day.
So that's another danger
that any web sleuth can get into.
It's that they're just so invested
in finding this person
that they lose all sense of reality around them.
That's a dangerous thing to do
and your mental health is too important to do that.
I've had to go to therapy…
because of this work.
And there's a lot of guilt that comes with this work
because you want to be able to prevent the next one,
but then the next one happens
because you didn't find out the information in time.
And there's also a lot of like:
'Oh god, humanity is so gross', you know.
Like we are so gross, why are we doing this?
So, I had to go to therapy
and it's out of my own pocket.
I have to pay for this.
So it's not like I have
a professional network to rely on,
you know, like people in law-enforcement would.
The first thing I would tell the people
that are interested in web sleuthing
is you can't be emotional.
So, if you're an emotional person
this is not gonna be…
a good area for you to go down.
When you're an emotional person,
I'm an emotional person so I know this,
when you're an emotional person,
your anger and your rage
over the things that you're investigating
sometimes cloud your judgement.
So I've learnt to kind of…
and just look at the facts.
D'you know what I mean?
And the more you look at the facts,
the more you get enraged
and the more you have to calm down.
So being an emotional person is a bad thing.
So, if you're an emotional person
you really have to learn how to tame your emotions.
You don't wanna add to the noise.
The second thing I would do
is go join the web sleuth's website and just observe.
Don't participate, just observe.
I learned so much by just watching.
Sometimes just watching
you'll get more knowledge than actually participating.
So you don't always have to have a voice,
you just sometimes have to listen.
The third thing I would tell somebody is
don't be afraid of technology.
Technology is sometimes this big, scary Org
that people are like afraid to like look in,
like, how do I figure out
where this email actually came from?
People are afraid to like,
use tools to figure out, you know,
those answers and I would say
don't be afraid of technology.