While this is certainly a newsy story, I also find it quite interesting how people are trying to use technology to try and remain anonymous when making bomb threats.
Here’s how one Alaskan gamer who thought he’d gotten away with making bomb threats to Lafayette University earlier this year by using a Russian phone number. But the FBI figured it out and arrested him just last week.
MCALL – A 20-year-old man in Anchorage, Alaska, purchased a phone number from a Russian website to create the anonymous Twitter account used to make bomb threats against Lafayette College in May, federal authorities say in court records.
Gavin Lee Casdorph willfully and maliciously made threats and conveyed false information concerning an attempt to kill individuals and damage and destroy buildings by means of an explosive, according to an arrest warrant filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Casdorph admitted last Tuesday to making the threats against Lafayette, according to an FBI agent’s sworn affidavit, and he was taken into custody Friday. A detention hearing is scheduled this Tuesday in the federal court for the District of Alaska.
Here’s the story…
On May 5, using the Twitter handle “BdanJafarSaleem,” Casdorph posted several threatening messages in which he claimed to have placed explosive devices around Lafayette’s Easton campus in order to “inflict the utmost damage possible,” according to the FBI. He claimed to have pledged allegiance to ISIS after the death of his grandfather and getting dumped by his girlfriend.
Casdorph also emailed the threats directly to numerous Lafayette College officials using a Yahoo email account, according to the FBI. Overnight, law enforcement officers conducted a campus-wide search before announcing they had not found “any malicious or hazardous materials.”
According to the affidavit, investigators identified the phone number used to verify the Twitter account. They traced it to a Russian web service that sells numbers to customers seeking to open social media or email accounts anonymously.
Owners of the unidentified web service provided the FBI information revealing that the same individual who had opened the “BdanJafarSaleem” Twitter account had also used the web service to create several other accounts around the same time.
Many of those accounts were under the name of a man actually enrolled at Lafayette at the time of the incident, the FBI said.
On Dec. 6, law enforcement officials interviewed this man at his home in Middleburg, Va. The affidavit doesn’t say whether he’s a current or former Lafayette student, and it only identifies him as Person 2.
This man “immediately told the interviewers he could help with the investigation” and that “he knew all about it,” according to the affidavit.
The Lafayette student said he was playing an online game called Counterstrike on the day of the threatened attack and was using a chat application called Discord to talk to fellow gamers, according to the affidavit.
The man said that he got into an argument with another gamer using the screen name “Neuroscientist,” who is apparently known for finding and broadcasting private information about other gamers (also known as “doxing”), the FBI said.
Following the bomb threats, another gamer told the Lafayette student that Casdorph, who used the screen name “Gavin,” was responsible for sending them, according to the affidavit.
Last week, FBI agents paid Casdorph a visit and executed a search warrant at his Anchorage home.
According to the affidavit, Casdorph admitted that the gamer called “Neuroscientist” asked him to make the threats against Lafayette. He also admitted purchasing the telephone number from the Russian website to set up the anonymous Twitter accounts, according to the affidavit.
Following his confession, Casdorph boasted to FBI agents that he believed it “would not have been easy for law enforcement to prove how he did it unless he admitted to it,” according to the affidavit.
Freel free to use this as an open thread.