The series tells stories of people caught in the dark and twisted web of modern misinformation and digital deception. Haunting, bizarre and up-to-the-moment relevant, the series explores consequences of 'SWATing', takes a chilling trip down the rabbit hole of white supremacy, joins a Federal hunt for the suspect of a brazen IRS heist and dives into Russian election interference. In the first episode, when an online gamer makes a series of fraudulent 911 calls to lure SWAT teams to innocent people's homes, his targeted trickery turns to tragedy.
In the second episode, the murder of a political staffer in 2016 spawns a myriad of unfounded conspiracy theories as the man's family and the truth hang in the balance. Following Seth Rich's murder, his parents filed a lawsuit with Fox News after conspiracy theories about his murder spread across the internet. Mary Rich told NPR that the combined trauma of her son's death and the attacks by conspiracy theorists caused intense and lasting distrust. After the case was resolved, Rich's parents said in a statement at the time that they were 'pleased with the resolution of this matter and sincerely hope that the media will take genuine precautions in the future'.
In this second episode, a woman recounts her journey to becoming a mouthpiece for white nationalist hate speech, work that culminates in high-profile violence and murder. Samantha confesses how she became a spokesperson on the Internet for the hate speech of one of the many white nationalist groups that swarm the United States. And this fact ended in racist violence and death during an event. 'I had to start to realize what I was supporting. Was I the victim or was I also a villain?' says Samantha, looking into the camera. Hand in hand with xenophobia, digital true crime seems to have no respite, and so it will be shown how those supremacists work with good Wi-Fi.
In the fourth episode, several women recall their harrowing experiences with one man's heinous attempts at virtual blackmail, aimed at obtaining sensitive sexual material. A woman tells us: 'I received a message from a man who said: Send me a naked picture or I will kill you'. This young woman was able to add her case to those of other women who were encouraged to denounce and expose the harasser. No one is completely invisible on the Internet.
In the fifth episode we will see from counterfeit Beanie Babies to very real tax crime. One person wonders if could make refunds in the name of dead people. It turns out that it can. We will also see an attempted fraud by two hackers to the IRS: the United States federal agency in charge of tax collection. These skilled hackers revisit cyber schemes that landed them in the sight of law enforcement.
The last episode explores Mescaline, the psychoactive molecule in San Pedro and peyote cacti, a sacred medicine that Native Americans have had to fight for the right to use. At the Indigenous practices there's always an elder, someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding. There's usually a group, a community is involved, There's always an intention, a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred, in order to achieve altered states of consciousness, which contribute to worship in various ways, or celebration or healing. But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all. In the old Greek histories of Eleusis, people who were initiated there got the drink, the kykeon, and then they had the illumination. The precise recipe is a mystery, but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries, a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment practiced by some of the world's greatest minds including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago? Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness considered threatening to the powers that be? Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear? Psychedelics has a major part in how we can heal as a community, how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country. The current renaissance of psychedelics could not come at a better time as the world confronts a crisis in mental health. But psychedelics have much to offer. The psychedelic experience changes the mind in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works. All these altered states allow us to probe what is the greatest mystery in all of nature. The emergence from mere matter of something as miraculous as consciousness. But an even bigger question is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis of how we think about our place in nature. One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject, the spirit of all species, not just our own. And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.
In the first episode, when an online gamer makes a series of fraudulent 911 calls to lure SWAT teams to innocent people's homes, his targeted trickery turns to tragedy.