By: Darthaggro
In case you weren’t all aware there’s a famous streamer who goes by the name of Phantoml0rd, he’s a popular streamer in the League of Legends community. His case being that he was a victim of hacker(s) known as DERP. He was targeted by DERP in a vicious DDoS attack, making it impossible for him to stream. Those who don’t know DDoSing is, it is not hacking. DDoSing is a simple (but over my head) technique used to make mass logins and cause the servers to crash.
Continuing onto the story Phantom couldn’t play a game while he streamed. He tried playing League of Legends, Dota 2, Club Penguin, World of Warcraft and other games, but all in vain as DERP always crippled servers. Phantom then tried to communicate with said “hackers” but only got nowhere with them. DERP decided to take it one step further by releasing his personal data out for the internet to know. His phone number, his address, his everything is now known throughout the internet.
His story worsens when DERP phoned the police and managed to frame Phantom as someone taking hostages and ordering pizzas (the pizzas being the biggest offense), thus triggering the police to get involved. Apparently the cops showed up with assault rifles, planning on taking in the streamer for his crimes he was accused of. A few hours of searching his house and questioning later, they released him.
He showed up later on his stream very winded and seemed exhausted explaining the situation from his point of view. He claims he explained to the cops he was a streamer (like explaining Twitch.tv to your parents) and he was being set fault to a vicious hacker attack because he was the most popular streamer at the time. This prompted said hackers to phone the cops like they did and make Phantom a scapegoat to a lie. However at the end of the day he was set free and no charges are being pressed against him.
Now that being said lets get into the nitty-gritty of what most people think of him. When I first heard of him I honestly thought “Wow, what streamer pisses the Internet off this much?” As I frantically searched the LoL forums and Reddit for more information I began to draw a picture of likely events. Keeping a tab open to his stream channel to listen in if and when he returned to his stream for a explanation, I saw the rumors arise of all of these events happening selfish reasons.
The popular opinion of why these candid events took place is that they were just for attention. He did it for the views, of course. He set this whole thing up just so he can use this publicity to get major hype and turn this into more of a profit (because he gets ad revenue so the more who watch, the more he makes). The lesser popular being that he was a victim of DERP: a person or group of hackers.
I hate to say this and sound noncommittal but I don’t know what to believe exactly. I don’t think anyone would go to such heights and to get the police involved for publicity but that idea doesn’t’ sound out of the park either. I also can honestly say I know from being an Internet person myself and seeing what the Internet is consisted of that this scenario is also possible. I guess what I’m saying is neither answer would surprise me at this point.
But to enlighten the community I believe that those who believe he did this for attention can rest assure that this hype won’t last very long. You can’t keep that many viewers on your stream saying “poor me, I was arrested” if all they want is to watch him stream video games. And those who think he was being wronged can continue supporting him, because this was all hectic and he said it himself, “his fans help him through this”.
In the end this was a crazy event that happened to a gamer and we shouldn’t just judge too harshly. After all, we are all gamers and the community needs to be bros.
GG all