After a booze packed night in London three vandals ran amok amongst the quiet early morning streets of the Portman Estate, home to many well know celebrities. Nothing really new in this but the three men in question decided to photograph and video their antics which they later posted on the “MySpace” networking website. One of the videos shows very clearly the three men jumping all over a valuable Lotus Elise sportscar while giggling and laughing.
Soon after the video was brought to the attention of the members of a Lotus Car enthusiasts club, SELOC, via their website. One of the members from the site, a Mr George ....., a resident of New Zealand made copies of all the information, videos and pictures that they had posted on the Myspace website. Most unwisely they included their names and lists of friends on public display.
Through some cunning detective work by George and other members of SELOC, the three were identified as Danny Worby, Scott Hobson and Adam Smith. The SELOC members were able to trace, using common web search sites, a host of information about Worby and Hobson; Smith remained more elusive due to the more common nature of his name.
Their drunken rampage lasted from .......add timestamps from photos.....and covered a wide area of London from..... to ....... As well as the damage to the car, the other videos published by the yobs included shots of abusive behaviour to innocent residents of London.
The video that George copied was also posted to the video networking website youtube; since when it has attracted over 26,000 views and had over 200 comments attacking the vandals posted. During this time Worby and Hobson became aware of the intense interest in their myspace webpages and tried to cover their tracks by making the webpages private. However, realising that they were already identified, they later deleted the pages completely. They are also suspected of trying to post on SELOC to distract the determined Lotus owners from the trail.
The SELOC members also managed to identify, from the video and aerial photographs on the internet (such as google earth), the exact place that the attack on the sports car took place, one of the members then visited the area and found the car. The registration details of the car, all of the photographs and videos and other information on Worby, Hobson and Smith were then provided to the police.
