After fake vaccines sprung up online during the COVID-19 pandemic, a professional ‘scambaiter’, set about uncovering them. We met him as he trolls and exposes the scammers using an old lady persona and voice distortion software.
The largest TikTok cult now has over two million followers who have pledged allegiance to its leader the "Mother Hen". We met Melissa Ong, 27, who explains how she created the Step Chickens, fought battles against other cults and continues to grow her following.
When Todd Matthews first tried to work out the identity of ‘Tent Girl’, an unknown woman who’d been found dead wrapped in a canvas sheet, it seemed impossible. Then the internet came along.
Robert Sell leads teams of hackers in competitions to find missing people. His Project, Trace Labs, selects missing people cases and then awards hackers points for finding information and any digital footprints to help crack the case.
The US Army’s use of killer drones has killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Brandon Bryant, a gamer, flew those drones. He tells us what life was like within the drone programme and why he decided to become a whistleblower.
Jerry Nyman works for the School District of Palm Beach County and his job regularly involves using Google Maps to check bus routes. Whilst undertaking a routine search in 2019, Jerry thought he could see a car in one of the man made lakes within a residential community in Florida.
From Head of Antifa to the QAnon Shaman, Spencer Sunshine has been accused of being countless different figures by far-right groups in retaliation for his work as a journalist reporting on extremism.
Eliot Higgins has exposed a Russian assassination squad, solved the mystery of how the MH17 plane was shot down and become an enemy of the Russian State.
A vicious troll destroyed Guy Babcock’s reputation by writing hundreds of posts calling him a "pedophile, thief and scammer.”
“When I saw her, I was so shocked that I started crying. I couldn't even say a word. Never in my life did I think I would have a twin.” Indonesian teenager Nadya is a regular Tik Toker but she didn’t expect to meet someone who looked exactly like her online. This is a story of an uncanny connection made through social media.
Like tens of millions of people, in 2017 Peter McCormack decided to get involved in Bitcoin -- the digital cryptocurrency that allows for direct, transparent financial transactions without a central bank. Unlike most people, he became a millionaire. Riding the highs of cryptocurrency trading, Peter began living a life of luxury, convinced he had figured out the secret of easy wealth. But just as soon as he had become a Bitcoin millionaire, he lost it all again. Now, armed with expert knowledge from his Bitcoin podcast, he's investing smarter and still all in one HODLing Bitcoin to the moon.
We spoke to VFX artist Chris Ume about the time his scarily convincing deepfake of Tom Cruise went viral on TikTok culminating in around 100 million views.
John Wiseman is a planespotter. He spends his days tracking radio data from planes across the country, logging them and mapping their movements.
Nyan Cat’s creator Chris Torres made one of the internet’s best-known memes. Ten years later, he sold it for more than half a million dollars.
We speak with Laura Spaulding, the founder of a company that does crime scene, hoarding, meth-lab, and other complex cleanups.
Foeke Postma, an investigative journalist at Bellingcat, used fake Instagram accounts to follow people, reverse search images, geolocate pictures, and watch videos frame by frame to identify customers and exotic animal suppliers in Dubai.
Aubrey Cottle (AKA Kirtaner) is one of the key movers of one of the biggest hacking groups in the world, Anonymous.
We meet Caitlin Abrams, who has gone viral for cleaning old gravestones and sharing stories about the lives and deaths of the people who lie underneath them.
Meet TikTok’s Masked Vigilante, who has made it his mission to track down and expose online bullies, scammers and trolls. If you’re racist, sexist, or generally abusive he may have you in his sights.
35 years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, parts of Chernobyl are still too radioactive for people to go to.
A.I. expert, Matthew Stamm, can identify deepfakes by 'dusting for digital fingerprints'. But it's a game of cat and mouse -- as soon as the 'good guys' figure out a way to identify a deepfake, the people making the fake content adapt.
Kurtis Minder is the middleman between hackers and companies with a lot to lose. He liaises with criminals, either for the release of data that’s being held hostage, or for assurances that the bad guys won't release sensitive information – including trade secrets, or personal information about high-ranking employees.
Sue Black has dedicated her life to catching child sex abusers. In the fight against some of the world’s most horrendous crimes Sue explains that although DNA has often been the gold standard, hands may hold the key to catching sex abusers.
Diver Jared Leisek ​finds the bodies of people who have been missing underwater. Sometimes they have been missing for weeks, sometimes it’s been decades.
Tens of thousands of Black girls and women go missing every year, but their faces are rarely the ones we see on the news.
In Syria’s Raqqa, locals tell stories of a mass grave used by ISIS to dump bodies. By using a drone and gathering evidence posted online, the Digital Investigations Lab at Human Rights Watch pieces together what happened, and who may be down there.
As the world watches the war unfold in Ukraine, many normal people with unique skills are done feeling helpless.
Denials and blame-shifting have long been the go-to for Putin’s regime. But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin disinformation machine has gone into overdrive.
An elite group of drone operators is leading the charge in Ukraine’s David-and-Goliath defence against Putin’s Russia.
Paloma Galzi is one of a handful of full-time forensic artists in the U.S. Combining science and art, her work creates age progressions of long-term missing children. Her work on cases has successfully brought numerous missing kids home safely.
Coder and TikToker, Sean Wiggs, regularly asks his followers to spam anti-union employers with fake job applications.
In January 2020, Kwajo Tweneboa watched his father fall ill with terminal cancer. But rather than dying in peaceful surroundings, their South London housing association home was full of cockroaches, mice and mould.
Blogger Jacob Bogle often receives this warning, “State-sponsored actors are attempting to hack into your account.”
Russian soldiers are banned from using their smartphones. But a lack of discipline and a desire for attention means they use them anyway. Their posts online provide a wealth of data about their side of the war.
It's hacker versus scammer. Scam baiter beats call center scammers at their own game. He’s able to hack their computer systems and watch their every move as they try to trick people out of their life savings.
In Iran, journalism is a dangerous game. As the regime kills protestors on the street, citizens are determined to get the word out to the rest of the world. But, how do you expose a government which views information as the enemy and arrests, tortures, and even kills journalists?
China is expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal, and fast. The country already boasts the world’s largest land-based missile force, and soon that group could be in possession of more than 350 nuclear warheads.
Influencers are the new face of Chinese propaganda. Hidden amongst the vlogs about puppies and makeup, they clandestinely allow Beijing to whitewash its crimes against humanity.
Gangs, cops, and militias have a choke-hold on some of Brazil’s neighbourhoods. As these groups battle for power, innocent people are massacred in the crossfire.