Hoaxer Neal Rauhauser Boasted About Creating Dangerous "Origins of Anonymous" ARG

In October of 2012, Neal Rauhauser published a "Compendium Of Trollish Behavior" on his personal blog in which he boasted about "some of the better hoaxes", he'd "been involved in over the last few years." Rauhauser often deletes his tweets, blogs, and whatever comments he can from the internet, when he faces lawsuits, cybercrime investigations, journalists working on stories related to him and because he often revises his conspiracy theories to target anyone he perceives as an enemy.

Rauhauser has always been braggadocious, but, in reality, nearly all of his hoaxes were unsuccessful, unless the intent was to scare and menace people, while calling himself the "Principal Investigator for The Internet."

Rauhauser's "Stranded In Spook Country" blogpost has been scrubbed from the Internet, but he wrote, "Is this a secret history of the origins of Anonymous? A weaponized alternate reality game? A training program for grassroots intelligence agents? A complex rabbit hole, but one that contains the clues of how to find the real ARG? The true answer to all of these is … kinda. The few people who texted 832-429-4827 for instructions have been sorted and then sent out on various quests based on their talents and temperament."

At the end of his post, Rauhauser added, "There are seeds out there that haven’t germinated yet. If you see anything with my name on it after the 2012 election you can assume that you are being trolled."

That wasn't the first time Rauhauser blogged about his "weaponized alternate reality game."

In another blog post, that has been scrubbed from the Internet, from March of 2012, Rauhauser wrote, "Origins of Anonymous is a bundle of five PDFs that I published during January while I was revisiting some of cyberpunk author William Gibson’s work in audiobook format. I was nearing the end of a class on alternate reality game design so this work very much reads like an ARG “trailhead”. I have actually put some time into developing this game, tentatively named “Spook Country”, but it will never be played – there are simply far too many real world dangers associated with the basis for the game for me to release it and remain within accepted bounds for an ARG puppetmaster. The style is a sort of grand “delusion of reference”, a bit of fun creative writing for me brought on by the combination of listening to Gibson and reading ARG maven Jane McGonigal’s book Reality Is Broken."

"I am a hacker, in the sense that I instinctively know how things fit together, rather than the 31337 h4x0r getting into people’s stuff use of the word," Rauhauser added.

Rauhauser then admitted how he does "really mean things" to "crazy people following [him] around injecting their mental illness into [his] life." For some reason, Rauhauser rationalizes trolling and cyberstalking anyone he considers a troll or cyberstalker, even if they are just reporting on his misdeeds.

"If you read the nealr Tumblr you will see a lot of fact, some ARG-ish posts, and a few that are obviously meant to convey one message to the overactive pattern matching of paranoid, delusional stalkers, and quite another to coherent readers," Rauhauser continued.

Rauhauser used to claim that he worked with a group he called "Anonymiss", but it's hard to tell when he tells the truth, since he rarely ever does, and he likes to start Twitter accounts such as "Reality Broker", "Elect Marc Rubio" or "The Real Q" to confuse people.

"Email addresses, phone numbers, Twitter accounts, Tumblr accounts, Scribd documents, and so forth come and go," Rauhauser wrote. "Some of it is me, some of it is Anonymiss, and like the geolocation bit above it’s all calculated to annoy the shit out of any obsessive stalker kook without providing anything they can actually use."

Rauhauser added: "A big chunk of the investigative work I do is with the help of Anonymiss – I play John Bosley’s role in Charlie’s Angels to about a dozen women who range in age from early twenties to mid fifties. They like solving puzzles and they keep a very close eye on things that would quickly drive me to distraction. I make it a point to not know names or locations and they don’t want to talk to you, so don’t even ask."

Finally, this is a cache link to an ARG forum that Rauhauser started a thread on in January of 2012, which was shut down after the mods expressed confusion about his intents and purposes.

"There is a simmering three way conflict between Andrew Breitbart partisans, members of Democratic Underground, and a motley band of b-tards/goons/EDiots from 4chan, Something Awful, and Encyclopedia Dramatica," Rauhauser announced in his "Spook Country" post.

But nearly everything Rauhauser wrote was complete nonsense and spin, since - in reality - Rauhauser has been accused of many computer crimes related to his hoaxes, and has spent much of the last decade hiding off the grid, so he can't be sued or easily reached by law enforcement agents.

"If you see people talking about this please point them to this post as a means of warning them off any involvement," Rauhauser added.

The forum was confused, and one member wrote, "I don't think this is an ARG. I think this person is genuinely crazy."

Rauhauser added another post, explaining that it was a warning not to play this real-life game, because he claimed it "actually got violent."

"It looks like an ARG trailhead, but it is most pointedly NOT - there are some ARG-ish features to the conflict because of the people that got involved, but posting here was not intended to attract new players - it's basically a creepy political thing that actually got violent in the first days of 2012 and I suspect it's going to keep escalating until a few of the ringleaders face serious consequences," Rauhauser wrote.

Then, in February of 2012, Rauhauser added "a small update" before the mods closed his forum, referring to his "secret history of Anonymous" ARG.

"I am learning about ARG design and I started playing with a back trail - a secret history of Anonymous," Rauhauser wrote. "I put in a bunch of story line - I'm a pretty good writer, and I know this topic well."

Most of what Rauhauser wrote is a pile of nonsense, and most of his predictions never came close to being true.

"I have done political consulting the last few years and it got really ugly in 2010 - think packing up on a moments notice and driving off into the night while the FBI hate crimes squad was knocking on doors in the states in the southeast," Rauhauser wrote. "Things have progressed from there - there are civil and criminal things going on in Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, and California."

Rauhauser added: "A couple of lawyers are going to lose their licenses, one guy seems primed for some jail time, another guy got hospitalized and there is a civil suit over that. I get targeted quite a lot - have to keep utilities and rent under company name rather than mine, I don't disclose travel plans, have basically dropped public speaking, etc. So my just for fun back trail and real world political stuff was getting swirled together, and I was worried someone would come along and say 'Oh, a game!' and end up getting dragged into something that is both very real and potentially violent. So that stuff is out there, it looks like a game, it might even feel like a game at first, but it will rapidly lead to people the Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized as white supremacists."

Any journalist that reports on anything connected to Neal Rauhauser, without mentioning his self-admitted background as a troll who spreads confusion and conspiracy theories to menace whomever he thinks is "crazy", is guilty of the same cyberharassment that this notorious hoaxer has committed for close to a decade.