Authorities hunting global monkey torture ring

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

Quote:

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.

This is revolting of course but even more than that it's just so damn bizarre and inexplicable.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/hTPj8dU