Hacker fakes brony's death, gets caught, won't shut up about it

On the morning of Thursday, June 27th, 2019, Horse News received an email from someone named "Constantine B" that read "Brony dead...apparently he passed away last night" accompanied by a collage of photographs of Joey Oropesa aka "PecachPictures" lying in a hospital bed. The word had spread quickly that Joey had passed away, and the brony community was in mourning. Within a few hours though, Joey appeared on a youtube livestream...very much alive, bringing a wave of relief and confusion to the fandom.

So what happened?

Well, a hacker had (according to Joey) allegedly broken into Joey's gmail account, found photos taken by Joey's father of Joey in the hospital bed (for a medical emergency, but not death), and proceeded to create the collage and send it out from the PecachPictures twitter account (which was also hacked) claiming Joey had died.

Who would do such a thing? And why?

Well those questions have since been answered and the alleged suspect - a Singaporean Hacker going by the screen-name "Benedict Ho" - WILL NOT SHUT UP ABOUT IT.

Let's take a look.

A massive effort was put in motion to identify the culprit and it wasn't long until the pieces pointed to a man from Singapore named Benedict Ho.

pic.twitter.com/IyVyc24TRK

— Archer 🏹 (@ArcherRedArrow) June 29, 2019

He was uncovered by a twitter user named ArcherRedArrow who was contacted by Benedict claiming to have taken "revenge" on Joey. These messages coming to light, mere hours after the announcement that Joey was alive.

HE ADMITTED IT...

He gave in!!@HorseNewsMLP you seeing this!!!????

This is the person who Faked my Death last week. Still bothering people 😡 pic.twitter.com/RISS9vPWRg

— PecachPictures.inc (@pecachpictures) July 4, 2019

Through a long series of online confrontations and repeated denials of responsibility, one of the Benedict accounts tweeted "pls just give me a chance" and "i know what i did is unforgiveable". Followers of the ordeal took this to be a tacit admission of guilt. 

Later, this exchange happened with a more concise choice of words. This only came after a nonstop barrage of tweets and direct messages to numerous individuals unrelated to the initial incident in an attempt to convince others of his innocence. 

"I feel sorry for hacking him"

The Horse News twitter inbox has been sent over seventy messages from him in such attempts, since Thursday.

 We had initially reached out to the alleged suspect get his side of the story, or at least determine what would lead someone to fake a brony's death and risk substantial legal trouble in the process. What we got was a series of both mercy pleas and death threats (a bold combination to say the least). We don't block anyone at Horse News (it's actually a policy of ours, along with not announcing a death without official confirmation). But at the rate we're going we might need to make an exception for this Ho.

Joey has long-since blocked the accounts tied to the Benedict Ho identity and advises others to do the same.

Joey has made it clear that he does not want the alleged hacker to get in any legal trouble, which is his choice. Our advice to any such hacker who wants to avoid such a fate though, would be to STOP.

JUST.

STOP.

We would like to take this moment to wish Joey well, and encourage everyone to change their account passwords frequently to avoid this sort of thing happening in the future.