The Troll Gets Found Out
So, my daughter, who was about eight at the time, was REALLY into Minecraft, as most kids are these days.
She was also desperately wanting to join the YouTube/Let’s Play culture, so I had installed some screen recording software that would let her make videos of the games she was playing so she could later upload them to YouTube.
Anyways, one day I’m minding my own business when I hear her quietly sniffling over on the computer. I asked her what was wrong, but she didn’t want to tell me so I let it go, but decided to keep an eye on her. A few minutes later I discovered what was happening.
Someone was harassing not only her, but also all the other kids playing on whatever server she was on. This kid was saying stuff about how he was going to harm my eight-year-old daughter (she told him how old she was hoping he would stop),
how he was going to hack into her IP and take her information, swearing profusely (remember, this is a game for kids), etc etc. By this time I had gotten my fiancée involved, and she was also obviously quite upset at what this kid was doing.
We then realized that our daughter had been recording the entire incident, and a plan began to form. I started by googling the kid’s username. There were several hits immediately, the most interesting of which involved a page where he was publicly applying to be a mod for a server on Minecraft.
I was able to learn a lot about this little idiot. He claimed to be 15, likes hockey, used to live in Toronto but now lives in Florida. But the bombshell was easily his Skype contact info; it was literally firstname.lastname. I know your name now, you jerk.
So I head over to Facebook and search for the name. Nothing. Hmmmm. On a hunch, I searched for just the last name, while narrowing my results to only the state of Florida. Several dozen hits. Hmmm.
So I have to start combing through each one, until I find what I was looking for: A middle-aged man with the same last name, whose profile indicates he was born in Toronto and now lives in Florida. I FOUND YOUR DAD, YOU LITTLE JERK.
So I sent him a message on Facebook, asking if he had a son named firstname who goes by his username on Minecraft. Dad confirmed I had the right guy. So my fiancée begins telling the dad everything that his son was saying to my daughter, and we sent him the recorded video as proof.
Radio silence for a few days. Then we got the message back. This jerk had his computer taken away from him for the entire summer. He had also been lying about his age; he was only 11, I think.
His parents were livid with him, and he surely hated the next few months of his life. No one screws with my daughter.