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Authorities hunting global monkey torture ring

Checkmite

Skepticifimisticalationist
Checkmite
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Several years ago - I want to say around five or six, but I can't say for certain - while frequenting various "mystery" forums and subreddits I saw a topic started by someone who was drawing attention to a particular YouTube channel. The channel was full of videos of small monkeys - baby macaques - and content-wise the videos were completely innocuous, just showing these baby monkeys eating or sleeping or playing or vocalizing or just looking around and being generally adorable.

What the poster was specifically pointing out were the comments on the videos. YouTube comments are known for being cesspits generally but the comment sections of all the videos on this channel were stand-out, full of people expressing extreme hatred of the monkeys, gleefully describing in graphic detail how they would like to hurt or torture them, and seemingly asking someone (the video uploader presumably) to do certain things to the monkeys, horrific things obviously.

Even though the comments seemed just oddly specific and focused to me for typical YouTube edgelordery, that's ultimately what I put it down to, since the videos themselves never showed anybody doing anything bad to the monkeys and never had suggestive titles or anything like that that indicated the uploader was encouraging that kind of material; it was an oddity that I took note of at the time, and then moved on and haven't thought about it more than once or twice over the years.

Which is why this article that was just published caught me completely by surprise:

Global network of sadistic monkey torture exposed by BBC

BBC journalists went undercover in one of the main Telegram torture groups, where hundreds of people gathered to come up with extreme torture ideas and commission people in Indonesia and other Asian countries to carry them out.

The sadists' goal was to create bespoke films in which baby long-tailed macaque monkeys were abused, tortured and sometimes then killed on film.

The BBC tracked down both the torturers in Indonesia, and distributors and buyers in the US, and gained access to an international law enforcement effort to bring them to justice.

At least 20 people are now under investigation globally, including three women living in the UK who were arrested by police last year and released under investigation, and one man in the US state of Oregon who was indicted last week.

..

The BBC also identified two other key suspects who are now being investigated by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - Stacey Storey, a grandmother in her 40s from Alabama who was known in the community as "Sadistic", and a ringleader known as "Mr Ape" - whose real name we cannot reveal for safety reasons.

"Mr Ape" confessed in an interview with the BBC that he had been responsible for the deaths of at least four monkeys and the torture of many more. He had commissioned "extremely brutal" videos, he said.

Storey's phone was seized by Department of Homeland Security agents, who found nearly 100 torture videos, as well as evidence that she had paid for the creation of some of the most extreme videos produced.
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This is revolting of course but even more than that it's just so damn bizarre and inexplicable.
 
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Checkmite said:
This is revolting of course but even more than that it's just so damn bizarre and inexplicable.
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Human beings are terrible. Some of them anyway.

Remember what people used to do to other people in the middle ages.

There used to be a thing called a "trial by ordeal". Or crucifixion. I could cite many other examples of horrific tortures that people would inflict on others out of pure spite and hatred.

It's hard to understand I guess, but history tells us that people have a sadistic streak. Take away the modern civilization and that's how people behave.

But I'm glad they were caught. So sad for the poor baby monkeys. :(
 
I wonder why Stacey Storey and others have their real names revealed but "Mr Ape" is protected by the BBC?

If for "safety reasons", wouldn't those same reasons apply to the others?
 
I recently watched the two documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence "about individuals who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966" (Wikipedia), so I am not surprised that Indonesia would be the place to go to for something like this. They trained for this on people:

Large-scale killings and civil unrest primarily targeting members of the Communist Party (PKI) were carried out in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. Other affected groups included alleged communist sympathisers, Gerwani women, trade unionists, ethnic Javanese Abangan, ethnic Chinese, atheists, so-called "unbelievers", and alleged leftists in general. According to the most widely published estimates at least 500,000 to 1.2 million people were killed,  with some estimates going as high as two to three million. The atrocities, sometimes described as a genocide or politicide, were instigated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Research and declassified documents demonstrate the Indonesian authorities received support from foreign countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
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Interesting that the USA and the UK apparently don't tolerate murder and torture of monkeys who can't be suspected of being communists, leftists, feminists or atheists ...
 
dann said:
I recently watched the two documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence "about individuals who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966" (Wikipedia), so I am not surprised that Indonesia would be the place to go to for something like this. They trained for this on people:
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Nah....that's quite a ways off base to say, I think. You're talking about things that happened around 60 years ago; in the article there are images of some of the people who've been arrested in Indonesia and they're men in their 20's, maybe 30's on the outside. born decades after all of that at any rate, there's very likely no connection. Plus, those crimes were locals killing locals for political reasons that they had a personal stake in. This business just seems to be a case of a handful of amoral opportunists who found out westerners would pay them to torture these particular animals.

At the same time though, this monkey torture thing is kind of not an isolated incident. A different kind of YouTube "ring" operated for several years, also based in southeast Asian countries, where the channel operators were making videos of themselves "rescuing" small and more traditionally loved animals like puppies and kittens from various dangerous situations...that the creators themselves had placed the animals in to set up the "rescues". But lest anyone think this is a uniquely southeast-Asian thing, an analogue existed more recently based in the United States where the channel creators would "save" overburdened turtles by removing heavy barnacle encrustations from their shells - the barnacles having been glued onto the turtles' shells by the video makers themselves, naturally.

Those creators also made money by torturing animals, but the difference is that their audiences thought they were watching animals being saved from terrible fates and given care by kind people with good intentions.
 
Puppycow said:
I wonder why Stacey Storey and others have their real names revealed but "Mr Ape" is protected by the BBC?

If for "safety reasons", wouldn't those same reasons apply to the others?
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Best guess is there might be a risk to family members who had nothing to do with it.
 
Checkmite said:
A different kind of YouTube "ring" operated for several years, also based in southeast Asian countries, where the channel operators were making videos of themselves "rescuing" small and more traditionally loved animals like puppies and kittens from various dangerous situations...that the creators themselves had placed the animals in to set up the "rescues". But lest anyone think this is a uniquely southeast-Asian thing, an analogue existed more recently based in the United States where the channel creators would "save" overburdened turtles by removing heavy barnacle encrustations from their shells - the barnacles having been glued onto the turtles' shells by the video makers themselves, naturally.

Those creators also made money by torturing animals, but the difference is that their audiences thought they were watching animals being saved from terrible fates and given care by kind people with good intentions.
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Its still going on, and though YouTube will demonetize and then ban science channels at the drop of an "I'm offended" claim, they refuse to do anything about this stuff...Look how long it took for them to remove the actual cat torture channel
 
Trebuchet said:
I saw Mr Ape's name somewhere on the web this morning. Don't remember where.
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Well, sometimes internet sleuths can be wrong about identifying people. I would remain skeptical until I can see exactly the process and evidence used to identify the individual. There were some clues in the longer BBC article.
 
Checkmite said:
Global network of sadistic monkey torture exposed by BBC
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One more thing I wanted to highlight from this article:

Telegram said it was "committed to protecting user privacy and human rights such as freedom of speech", adding that its moderators "cannot proactively patrol private groups".
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So Telegram is officially saying that they aren't going to do a damn thing about it.

Facebook and YouTube's responses at least said that they remove such content as soon as they become aware of it. Telegram seems to be set up as a safe haven for extreme/illegal content.
 
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