About two years ago, Goonswarm was aiding our allies, Red Alliance (RA, the aforementioned 'rats' with whom SirLordex is cross) in the invasion of the Scalding Pass region against Lotka Volterra and their coalition. Lotka Volterra had unveiled one of the first Titans against us to
catastrophic consequences, and at the time these profoundly silly ships were nearly impossible to kill through legitimate in-game means; they were essentially invulnerable, with the only Titans destroyed through catching the ship while the pilot was disconnected from the game. It was determined that 'The Enslaver' and his Avatar-class Titan had to go. I was approached by one of the leaders of Red Alliance to help make this happen, but almost immediately we were down the rabbit hole.
Much to my surprise, the RA director didn't want in-game information from me; he wanted us to use the forensic resources of our intelligence agency to trace down The Enslaver's home address. At a coordinated time, armed with this information, a RA member would apparently cut the power to The Enslaver's house in the real world, and in EVE a RA capital fleet would assault the abruptly pilotless Titan. Yikes.
As one can imagine, I demurred, but the RA director didn't want to take 'no' for an answer and I didn't fancy telling him that I thought he was completely insane. I said that I'd 'look into it', and that's when things began to get really crazy - Kugutsumen got involved.
Kugutsumen is a French national living in Jakarta, Indonesia who was convicted as a teenager in the early 1990s of phreaking the FBI's conference call system and running up $250,000 in international calls. He now runs an extremely successful computer security business, when he's not setting up nightclubs in Jakarta or messing about in the EVE universe. He copped a ban from CCP years ago for breaking the
T20 scandal after penetrating the Band of Brothers director forums, but it seems the banning completely removed all restraint on his behavior regarding the game; he set up his own forum to cover the hidden news of EVE by publishing snippets from the forums of other alliances. One might suggest that he is also a little off when it comes to the sanity scale, though I personally adore him.
Why didn't I have to deal with RA trying to cut the power to The Enslaver's house to kill his Titan? Because Kugutsumen, out of either idle curiosity or malice aforethought, traced The Enslaver's ip addresses back to Iceland, confronted him on Lotka Volterra's teamspeak while under an assumed name, recorded the conversation, and
then outed him as a GM and CCP employee. This resulted in the immediate removal of the Enslaver character, as GMs cannot have their identity known - since this era of gameplay, CCP has radically revised and tightened the restrictions of where and how their employees can play, but this was the Bad Old Days. While the Titan was eventually given to another pilot - and that pilot was much more cautious with it than The Enslaver - by that point Lotka Volterra had already lost the war.
