Mr Swirl: The Internet's Most Disturbed User

Pattaya Thailand two young Brothers enter a local internet cafe take their seats and begin playing their favorite games one boy was 13 and the other just ate and together they sat there and played the way they always did getting lost in their screens wasting the day away until one of the boys felt a tap on his shoulder standing there beside them was a similarly aged child a stranger to the boys but a friendly one who strikes up a conversation and eventually poses an offer according to the unnamed child he had a friend who lived close

by that owned a special computer one far better than the device they were currently using and one that had any game you could ever dream of playing and he was headed to that friend's home right now but he didn't want to go alone it was an offer that the boys just couldn't refuse and considering the child was clearly around their age they saw no red flags and agreed to go with him following the boy to a nearby apartment building then up seven flights of stairs and into a dark room but waiting for them inside that

room wasn't some sort of supercharged computer and it surely wasn't a friend of the boys and instead it was a monster in every sense of the word a depraved Soul who years down the line would go on to become one of the most notorious Predators ever to walk this Earth and entity known only at the time as Mr swirl and these children had just fallen into his trap aware to obscure his own face in the picture foreign hey guys I just wanted to announce that I am currently working on two collaborative projects with my good

friend nexbo AKA Ryan together we made this channel called Nick and Ryan where we travel to some of the most haunted locations in the United States to try and see if we can go from being Skeptics to Believers which were already three episodes in and things have gone completely off the rails but I can honestly say it's some of the most fun I've ever had creating so hopefully it'll be just as fun for you guys as well and a nice break from this disturbing content over here and also we've been working on an ARG clothing

line called liminal land which has been an amazing passion project for the both of us and we're already cultivating such a unique and creative fan base over there which has been super cool and super inspiring so I'll leave a link below both to liminaland.net as well as the new Nick and Ryan Channel I would love it if you went and gave both of them a try but if not absolutely no worries because this channel is not going anywhere okay back to the disturbing video foreign it's unclear if they knew what they were looking for or

if they had just happened upon it by pure chance but in 2004 German police entered a long forgotten storage unit where beneath the piles of junk and old appliances they'd unearth a single hard drive once plugged into the computer the device revealed hundreds of images some showing various locations breathtaking scenery delicious meals and CP the images showed scenes of depraved sexual abuse being done to individuals who were clearly miners with this abuse being far worse than you'd ever imagine and it wasn't just one child either as across that hard drive seemed to be evidence of

multiple separate instances of abuse including images of three young boys taken in a dark apartment building the discovery was horrid though sadly all in a day's work for investigators who encountered things of this nature on a daily basis and it's a discovery that likely would have never been discussed by the media after that one day had it not been for one unusual detail typically in cases involving CP those taking the photographs and Performing the actual abuse will almost always go out of their way to ensure that they aren't shown on camera that way if Authority

should stumble upon it they would essentially be unidentifiable however the dozens of photos found on this particular hard drive were different because rather than hiding just out of frame like all the other Predators seem to do The Man Behind These images had instead gone out of his way to ensure he was featured within them shamelessly inserting himself into every single picture even posing for them before during and after he had changed the lives of these kids forever and although his entire body was shown in these photographs the only thing hiding his identity was the addition

of a single Effect one that swirled the man's face into a distorted pixelated mess making him completely unrecognizable and leaving his face to look like this there was something so disturbingly arrogant about it a man posing with his victims while destroying their lives hiding behind only a single swirl of color almost as if he was taunting any investigators who might eventually find these images and given the clear indications that this man was obviously a Serial abuser and likely still out there offending tracking this Anonymous figure down became Priority One for law enforcement in the area

and it's there that he would be given his nickname Mr swirl and with this world being the only thing standing in the way of investigators getting to see his face most would have assumed that identifying him would be a walk in the park however this was far from the case as the images began to be dissected it quickly became apparent that deciphering the sensor was going to be far more difficult than initially thoughts and potentially even impossible as the pixels had been scrambled in such a unique way that there wasn't any known method to unscramble

it and quickly what should have been their most valuable clue the one that stood so tantalizingly close became a lost cause leaving investigators at their first dead end realizing that things were about to get much more difficult the German police Enlisted the help of an agency known as Interpol an international crime stopping organization with a special unit dedicated to resolving crimes against children Interpol immediately began to get to work attempting to decipher the photos in a different way this time by using context clues in the pictures to track down where exactly they were taken which

in turn could tell them where this man was from and where the abuse was taking place but this too Unearthed yet another problem the first batch of images was discovered to have come from Cambodia but the next showed evidence that the man was in Vietnam and then in Thailand and potentially even South Korea as well rather than gaining Clarity the locations of these images instead made the search even wider as the man was seemingly traveling from country to Country committing his crimes and then fleeing thus never staying long enough for law enforcement to catch up

with him making it completely unclear to investigators where he was actually from and given just how vast his travels were at this point it was realized that Mr swirl could be anywhere a moving Target so to speak and an active one as well during the investigation which would later be dubbed operation Vico in reference to Vietnam and Cambodia which seemed to be the main sites of his abuse investigators made a disturbing discovery that Mr swirl's photographs were not exclusive to just that hard drive as photo after photo began to appear on various online forums with

all of them featuring that Disturbed swirling face the images were shared across the web seemingly straight from the man himself and were sent out to various predatory groups that were filled with individuals just as sick as he was Within These groups it was considered a badge of honor to show your body and face within the content you made thus leading to the sender becoming well respected among his peers which showed us two things one that this was likely the reason why Mr swirl inserted himself in these photos as it had led to him becoming a

beloved member of their Twisted community in turn granting him access to all the CP he could want and two that the images found on the hard drive did not account for his whole body of work as in these chat rooms and forums police would find far more photos featuring their suspect raising the total from a few dozen to nearly 300. by this point Mr swirl had been untraceable authorities were essentially searching for a ghost and though these new images must have felt like a gut punch at first they would eventually prove to be integral to

their investigation as for the first time in their hunt Mr swirl had made a key error Within These postings Mr swirl had forgotten to hide his IP address in turn revealing the general area in which they had been sent with a location being Vancouver Canada this break revealed the key detail that he had some sort of tie to Vancouver and that he was likely a sex tourist someone who travels to countries that have loose laws around their age of consent in order to be able to abuse children without any repercussions with Mr swaro clearly doing

the same thing visiting multiple countries in Asia making his material coming home and then sharing it with his friends it certainly didn't solve the case but it was finally a step in the right direction and unbeknownst to the team working on operation Vico they were quickly approaching an even bigger Revelation as authorities were working hard on pinning down Mr squirrel's location some members of the team held on hope that the images themselves could still be unscrambled and upon digging a bit deeper one member of the team would actually recognize the swirl as having come from

a fairly standard editing program which revealed something the swirl effect wasn't like a typical sensor or blur those effects completely mask or even remove the pixels from the actual photograph making them nearly impossible to decipher but this effect did neither of those things and instead it simply rearranged the pixels of the man's face into a swirling pattern meaning that this image still contained all of its original pixels and Mr swirl's face was somewhere in this picture they just had to piece it together and so in what must have felt like a Hail Mary at the

time an investigator put one of the images into that very same editing software then clicked that very same swirl effect and simply reversed it which in turn led to this [Music] in an investigation that started all the way back in 2004 finally Mr swirl's face was revealed with a single click a whole three years later confirming not only what the man looked like but also that it was truly just one man behind the swirl and now all they had to do was find him Interpol first started their search by sending this man's image to every

single police station the network had access to asking if anyone across the world had a criminal in their database who might match this photo but this attempt would fall flat indicating that whoever this man was he likely had no prior criminal record time was clearly of the essence and they knew that with every waking moment Mr swirl could be adding to his list of growing victims and wanting to act fast Interpol made a fairly unprecedented decision they reached out to every single major news Outlet across the world and asked them to show this man's face

on their broadcast to help bring this Predator to Justice Additionally the images of Mr swirl's face were also plastered in all corners of the internet and within Just One Day the story was quite literally everywhere what started as a small search for an anonymous man had become an international Manhunt overnight and within just hours Mr swirl would be anonymous no more our top news story this hour the worldwide search for a suspected pedophile that's concentrated in Thailand this morning we now know the suspect is a Canadian the cbc's Michael McAuliffe reports from Bangkok this morning

Interpol announced they now believe they know who the man is he's been identified as a Canadian 32 year old Christopher Paul Neal his name is Christopher Paul Neal not only did Neil's face and body match perfectly with Mr swirl but he also had grown up just outside of Vancouver where the IP was tracked to and he had moved from country to country across Asia in recent years countries like Cambodia Vietnam and Thailand the resemblance was so undeniable that even one of his own family members came forward to help identify him Christopher Neal was in fact

Mr swirl a discovery that came with some disturbing Revelations as it turns out Christopher Neal was actually working as a children's English teacher a job he had held in each of the countries he was discovered to have abused in young boys in making it likely that he used this position of power to lure in children from his classes to eventually abuse them and share their photos online along with this it was also revealed that he had used his relationships with young boys to help lure in other children for him to assault as looking back on

the story that started this video he had recruited a clueless child he knew to lure those two brothers back to his apartment this discovery also shined a spotlight on his social media pages and specifically his Myspace page where he chillingly wrote loving Asia will I ever come back while in the midst of his abuse spree but for me one of the most shocking revelations was that those images that he had posted during the investigation weren't actually posted to his computer at some point in the early 2000s Neil had stopped home for a brief vacation to

visit his family and while there he decided to upload all of his CP to his internet friends but rather than using his personal device or a public computer he instead broke into his own brother's laptop and uploaded his content there that way the images would be tracked to his brother and not him which explained why he never bothered to hide his IP address the more they learned the more Disturbed the story became as even at the time they discovered his identity it was revealed that he had currently been working in South Korea as a teacher

but when the officers arrived to arrest the man he was already long gone having certainly seen his face all over the news Christopher made the decision to flee the country being spotted in this image captured at an airport in Thailand as he had flown to the country likely in an attempt to find Refuge throughout the following days and weeks his likeness would turn up time and time again in the country indicating that he was somewhere in Thailand hiding out and having cornered him in the region it wouldn't take long for police to knock on the

door of an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere in which Christopher Neal happened to be hiding bringing the multi-year search for Mr squirrel to an end foreign following his arrest By Thai police you will be charged for his assault on those three young boys from the internet cafe as it was the only crime they could prove had taken place in their country and with it carried a prison sentence of five years admittedly the sentencing was light but the plan was to have Neil turned over to Canadian authorities after he did his time in Thailand

where they would also prosecute him all over again with a hope being that they could do the same thing with countries like Cambodia and Vietnam and essentially forced him to live out his life in prison however when the sentence was completed in 2012 and Christopher was deported back to Canada the shocking decision was made to allow Christopher Neal to walk free foreign was detained in Canada authorities let him walk under the condition that he would never own a device that connected to the internet again as well as the agreement that he would stay away from

Parks schools and also register as a sex offender I can't for the life of me understand why this decision was made but from what I could gather it seemed to center around the fact that his crimes were International and that none of his other victims had actually come forward meaning the other countries they had hoped would prosecute never actually bothered to pursue it and because his crimes didn't happen on Canadian soil not much could really be done legally speaking and so in the end the hunt for Mr swirl ended up lasting almost as long as

the sentence he served and even after everything this man did he was let loose and allowed to assimilate back into society [Music] but this isn't where our story ends not even a full year later in 2013 it would be uncovered that Christopher Neal had somehow managed to purchase a computer and also connected to the internet a clear violation of his conditions and though we claimed it was just for writing a book about his life experiences when investigators sees the device they would unsurprisingly find even more CP 25 images to be exact including two with his

signature swirling face as it turns out Christopher had been using the device to contact his fellow friends where he would even message one of his Disturbed friends right after his release saying the swirl liveth still proving without a shadow of a doubt that he was remorseless about his crimes and took pride in his new nickname and somehow the discovery got even worse from there as it was revealed that a friend of his had shown him how to access the Deep Web and how to share these photographs in practically an untraceable way thus allowing him to

continue being active in these predatory groups no matter what restrictions were placed on him after Canadian police made this discovery Christopher would yet again be arrested and this time they had the chance to really send a message and put him away forever as clearly letting him walk away the first time was a mistake as he wasn't reformed even in the slightest and so to make up for this the judge would give Christopher Neal the whopping sentence of just five and a half years with time served meaning that he would only end up in jail for

a little over 14 months the prosecution praised the sentence as a win and Christopher vowed to change his ways but it just doesn't sit right that as of 2016 Mr swirl the man responsible for dozens and dozens of instances of extreme child abuse which by the way are just the ones that we know of is a free man now living a normal life in Vancouver and worst of all he now has access to share this material through untraceable Avenues meaning that there is a good chance that he could still be out there obtaining sharing and

who knows maybe even producing his content the case of Mr swirl is such a frustrating one for once a case of this nature gained worldwide attention and was pursued by the full extent of the law with the folks over at Interpol doing a fantastic job with the case only for it all to be deflated once he was finally captured just knowing that he's out there living a normal life after all this after all the lives that he's forever affected makes this one of the most disheartening cases we've covered to date [Music]