In case you missed it: a few weeks ago I wrote a guest article in New York Magazine's "Select All" blog about Kiwi Farms, a community which stalks and harasses those they perceive as mentally ill and/or sexually deviant for sport. In many cases, KF's activities go way beyond fair comment or criticism of their targets' public lives, falling well into criminal stalking and harassment territory. This is particularly true for Christine Chandler (aka Chris-chan), Kiwi Farms' first and favorite victim, whose life has been so meddled with and monitored by trolls that it reminds me of "The Truman Show". In brief, my article captured the ethos of a community of stalkers punching down at vulnerable people in order to feel functional and successful themselves.
Since that article went to press, I'm pleased to report that the negative publicity seems to have made it a lot harder for Kiwi Farmers to do what they do. PayPal has terminated Kiwi Farms and the CWCki’s accounts (used to process account upgrades and donations), and their domain registrar dumped them, forcing Kiwi Farms to change their URL. KF's admin/owner Josh Moon has been forced to come up with workarounds for these closures, one of which seems to be finding people as unsavory as him willing to host the Kiwi Farms community. This brings me to Francisco Dias, who's currently giving Kiwi Farms space on the Internet via his company Frantech Solutions.
Francisco Dias seems to be a pretty shady character. He has racked up a fair number of complaints regarding his services as a web host. He seems to have filled out some of his domain registrations with fake addresses; for example what he claimed as the permanent address of BuyVM was actually the the San Jose branch office of the IRS. Frantech Solutions listed its contact address as an LLC registration office in Wyoming. These efforts at concealing his actual contact information makes Frantech look like a fly-by-night operation.
Even more troubling than the falsified documents, Dias seems to have a history of unethical behavior. For example, someone claimed that he and Dias were in a "shilling/plugging" scheme, where each guy would act as spokesman for the other. Dias' alleged former co-worker posted nearly 30 screengrabs as proof of his claims, seemingly upset that Dias was now "spreading lies about my personality and whatnot." I tried to reach out to Dias regarding these allegations about his business practices and relationship with Kiwi Farms, but he didn’t respond by press time. In fact, my second inquiry to his personal email bounced, suggesting that Francisco received my initial message and blocked further messages from me in response.
Currently, Dias gets up to $200 per month to keep hosting Kiwi Farms. This is apparently enough to keep Dias running with the community dedicated to stalking the mentally ill for entertainment purposes. I think that's a remarkably small sum considering the liability continuing to host KF represents to him and his companies. Consider the following:
Kiwi Farms has a history of getting kicked off its server space for child abuse
Allegedly, Kiwi Farmers collect and post child porn in certain threads on the site dedicated to ”exposing pedophiles”. These images have gotten KF kicked off DigitalOcean in Feburary, and then Gandi.net in April, both times over the same images and content, which Moon refuses to delete. Though Moon asserts that everything on Kiwi Farms is protected speech, the community has an entire subforum dedicated to takedown notices and other legal complaints sent to KF by its stalking victims, essentially mocking them for even attempting to report it.
Indeed, the Kiwi Farms community openly hosts revenge porn and leaked data from its targets’ inboxes —
Josh Moon has a history of harboring child porn in communities he moderates
Before Kiwi Farms' current administrator Josh Moon took over Kiwi Farms from the CWCki's owner/lead archivist, he worked for Fredrick Brennan, then owner/operator of 8chan. During Moon's tenure as moderator, a number of disturbing boards relating to the sexual exploitation of children ranked among 8chan's top communities, open to the public in its master list of boards. Dan Olson documented these in detail in December 2014, and Brennan responded by deleting some of the worst offenders.
Moon was officially fired from 8chan in January 2016, after failing to deliver on contract work and allegedly taking payment from Brennan up-front. Nevertheless, the child porn on 8chan cost Brennan his access to financial services like Paypal and Patreon and significantly frustrated his business dealings, eventually causing him to sell 8chan in July of this year.
Kiwi Farms policy allows users to stalk children
A month after Moon was fired from 8chan, a KF staff member who calls themselves “Dynastia” requested permission to start doxing children. The matter was put to a vote and Dynastia's proposal won 14-10: kids were hereby "halal" (i.e. fair game), and could be targeted using the same methods KFers use on adults. Since then, Kiwi Farms have been rounding up childrens' info and pictures - starting with the kids of existing targets, and then expanding to communities like WrongPlanet to find more vulnerable kids with better internet access. In general, it is now considered "halal" on Kiwi Farms to entice minors you found on autism support forums into making accounts, to bully them, and then dox them and aggregate their photos for spurious purposes.
Is this really the company Dias wants on his books? Is Josh Moon the kind of guy Dias wants plugging his wares? Multiple inquiries made to Mr. Dias for comment were not responded to, so I have to assume the answer is yes. Kiwi Farms and its grab bag of abuse, defamation, hacking, identity theft, and child abuse is the kind of community Dias wishes to associate himself with. And Josh is understandably happy to finally find a host willing to ignore reports of illegal activity and stick with him - indeed, referring new customers to Frantech is one of the ways Moon's getting revenue into KF since the PayPal ban.
It seems to me like Mr. Dias is putting himself at considerable risk for a pretty small payout. He's getting about $200 a month and maybe some referrals, and in exchange he hosts a community which, to quote its owner, is "an expensive pain in the ass and is a bigger technical and legal challenge every day." That might be an understatement: Kiwi Farms is a massive liability for themselves and anyone who chooses to associate with them.
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