After a series of bans by payment providers, Joshua Conner Moon the owner of Kiwi Farms had created a website to hide the payment provider used to receive donations to his website. A number of concerns arose about the site, called lolcow.us, including breaches of numerous compliance rules. Impressively, this week their acquirer bank terminated them after receiving concerns I had sent to the card network, MasterCard. Furthermore, terminated merchants are automatically added to a blacklist that (depending on the reasons) can make it hard or impossible to find a new provider to receive card payments in future.

MasterCard have robust regulatory processes that respect the right to free speech whilst protecting the financial system from abuse.

Joshua Conner Moon, the owner of Kiwi Farms is an extreme embarrassment to the alt-right and to the causes he claims to support, such as “Free Speech”.

For some time Kiwi Farms has been moving from host to host and from payment provider to payment provider. A lot of work was done on this last year and in the end Joshua Moon created a bespoke donations website to hide his merchant bank / provider.

The intent was to prevent further terminations. For those opposed to Kiwi Farms the challenge has been to find a more permanent way to prevent Kiwi Farms simply moving on each time there is a problem.

When Moon set up lolcow.us he could have gone legitimate. There were some minor problems with the site but initially they would not have been apparent. True to form however, Moon failed to do so.

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A few weeks ago, Matthew Hopkins News reported that a person claiming to be a Kiwi Farms user had sent threats to a school and MP to stalk a child in the rough area where Oliver Smith lives, demanding that bloggers and Oliver stop criticising Kiwi Farms. A subsequent, anonymous, paper letter was sent to Smith’s home following up on the same threats, with the same goals. With Darwin-award level stupidity, the sender used signed for delivery. This tracks the sender location and timestamp as well as the recipient and all UK post office have CCTV. Subsequently the sender was finally revealed – and their identity is with the police and FBI.

This letter appears to follow up on the terror threat email. It is full of wild allegations but without signature, name or address of sender but has been written by a Kiwi Farms supporter using my style to try to implicate me. Also, best not to use signed for delivery.

This has to be the stupidest thing I have ever read. It is clearly menacing and it is anonymous (it goes on for another crazy page) and wildly untrue but the tracking number is stuck to the envelope. Whoever wrote it clearly expected to be untraceable, so they deserve a Darwin award for stupidity. Royal Mail records show that it was sent from a post office in the B and M store in Park Street Liverpool L8 4UE at 13:12 on 21 March 2017. The shop confirms it holds CCTV. After the extent to which the ‘anonymous’ sender fouled up began to circulate however, there was a fresh revelation.

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Yesterday a well wisher determined that hate group Kiwi Farms was being hosted by service provider Codero.com. Action was swiftly taken to draw this to the company’s attention as Codero has very clear policies against hate speech and disclosure of personal information. Today Kiwi Farms reported an outage (archive here). It is unclear if this relates to host loss but verification is in progress and if necessary further action will be taken. Supporters are now able to reliably identify Kiwi Farms’ hosts on a regular basis. As Kiwi Farms breaks the terms of nearly every known hosting company, it is likely to be quickly moved on.

The incident does give an opportunity to explain a new tactic. In the past, when Kiwi Farms has been banned by hosts it has often been able to obtain refunds even when the owner has clearly committed a repudiatory breach of contract. A new approach for the anti-Kiwi campaign is to ask terminating hosts to withhold funds where they are legally entitled to do so.

For example, if a hosting company has a policy against publishing phone numbers and has to spend engineer time investigating allegations that a site has published phone numbers before terminating the account then they should withhold relevant funds.

Not all hosts will comply, but many will and the mere existence of this strategy should have a profound effect on Kiwi Farms funds. It means that Joshua Conner Moon cannot pay for significant periods of hosting in advance without risking the whole amount being lost. As pre-purchase often attracts significant discounts, this will increase the monthly costs of running Kiwi Farms even before litigation and other expenses.