By the age of 10, he was playing the video game Minecraft, in part to escape what he told friends was an unhappy home life. In Minecraft, he became known as an adept scammer with an explosive temper who cheated people out of their money, several friends said.
Millions of teenagers play the same video games and interact in the same online forums as Clark. But what emerges in interviews with more than a dozen people who know him, along with legal documents, online forensic work and social media archives, is a picture of a youth who had a strained relationship with his family and who spent much of his life online becoming skilled at convincing people to give him money, photos and information.
Clark doted on his dog and didn’t like school or have many friends, said James Xio, who met Clark online several years ago. He had a habit of moving between emotional extremes, flying off the handle over small transgressions, Xio said.Abishek Patel, 19, who played Minecraft with Clark, defended him. “He has a good heart and always looks out for the people who he cares about,” he said.
Clark once offered to sell his own Minecraft user name, “Open,” said Nick Jerome, 21, a student at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. The two messaged over Skype and Jerome, who was then 17, said he sent about $100 for the user name because he thought it was cool. Then Clark blocked him. Clark’s interests soon expanded to the video game Fortnite and the lucrative world of cryptocurrencies. He joined an online forum for hackers, known as OGUsers, and used the screen name Graham$. His OGUsers account was registered from the same internet protocol address in Tampa that had been attached to his Minecraft accounts, according to research done for The New York Times by the online forensics firm Echosec.
Bennett soon received an extortion note, which he shared with the Times. It was signed by Scrim, another of Clark’s online aliases, according to several of his online friends. Bennett said in an interview that a Secret Service agent told him that the person with the stolen bitcoins was not arrested because he was a minor. The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment.
Someone should have nurtured this young man and guided him toward being a white hat.
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