This week the St. Louis band Spelling
Bee posted a screencap of emails from an account that they
believe was used by the police in a sting before their recent
Boston show. It reads like an
amazing parody of what you might imagine a cop trying to pose as a
young punk would look like.
“Boston Punk Zombie,” reads the crudely-scrawled avatar of a
green-mohawked punk with the address bostonbeatgang@gmail.com. That
name is apparently a generic-brand knockoff of an infamous Boston
hardcore gang. Cred achieved. “What's the point” reads the tagline
under the profile pic.
“Too bad you were not here this weekend,” “Joe Sly” wrote.
“Patty's day is a mad house I am still pissing green beer.
The cops do break balls something wicked here. What's the address
for Saturday Night, love DIY concerts.” He might as well have
written “Just got
an 8 ball of beer and I’m ready to party.”
Is it possible that Joe Sly is a real Boston punk? Sure, though
if so he’s the first Boston punk in history to brag about drinking
lame St. Patrick’s Day green beer....
The Massachusetts band Do No Harm also
tweeted about receiving an email from Joe this month.
“whats the 411 for the show saturday?” he asked, apparently using
some sort of slang-filter translator from the turn of the
century.
Then there’s the case of Donna Giordano, a hip youth who’s
recently been reaching out to local show promoters
from her
Facebook account. “Is the show still going on Friday in JP? If
so where. Thnxs,” she wrote in a Facebook message to another local
promoter, who also asked to remain anonymous. When he asked
her to make him feel comfortable that she wasn't a cop, she
replied, “that's a new one. How? Flash a boob Ha Ha Ha how do I
know your not some sketchy creep who lures girls to your basement
for some Hostel like horror show on the guise of a music show”
Details like that are among the typical warning signs you might
find when dealing with an online scam—it’s a recently created
account with very few friends, almost no interaction with anyone,
and generic-looking pictures. Her cover photos
include a
snapshot of the No. 66 bus in Allston (so you know she's
repping Allston hard), and a generic Boston skyline photo, you
know, like most twentysomething girls into the punk scene will
always post on
their walls. In this light, her “I love the
pit!” photo
of a mosh pit, obviously taken from an Internet thumbnail,
looks like one of the saddest feints ever....
You don’t have to be a local-music Agent Smith, though, to tell
that some of these emails smell pretty fishy. “Hey there, local P
native here,” wrote one probable imposter to a local band, (who
probably meant to type JP, slang for Jamaica Plain). “What is
the Address for the local music show tonight?"
The local music show tonight? Who talks like that
about a DIY show? Someone not used to talking about music, that’s
who....
As a result of efforts like this, promoters and houses have
become much more cautious when they receive requests out of the
blue for information about shows. And this kind of caution may be,
in its way, a kind of success for the BPD initiative. It's kind of
hard to put on a show when you can't tell anyone ahead of time
where it's going to be. In that sense, the cops seem to be
succeeding through another tried-and-true Internet tradition.
Trolling is almost always transparently obvious, but when it's
unflagging and endlessly annoying, it can be extremely
discouraging. Troll a group of people hard enough, and they may end
up saying, like famed Boston Beat Gang punk Joe Sly, “What's the
point?”
An argument between a Muslim shopkeeper and his
