Lolcow.email is, according to its creator Joshua Moon, “The fruit of Kiwi Farms”. Essen
tially, it’s an email server optimized for people who want to send burner emails with fraudulent or shocking domain names. The service has been designed to make registration of a new account quick and easy, and to allow Kiwi Farms staff to delete accounts or otherwise cook their books and warn users whose threats are being investigated. I myself was threatened on August 16 via Lolcow email, in the message I posted above. In it, the person threatening me said they used Tor to cover their tracks.
I thought that was really curious, because Moon’s said before that he disabled signing up and sending messages using the Tor Browser, which conceals your IP address and identity from the sites you visit online. Moon also claimed that the FBI visited him over threats sent on the Lolcow.email server. Kiwi Farms staff member Dynastia also confirmed to me Tor had been disabled on lolcow.email for months.
It seems Josh Moon and Dynastia were lying. This afternoon, I logged into Tor and was able to successfully send myself a test message using lolcow.email.
I am unclear why Josh Moon and Dynastia would lie about something that can be so easily verified; so maybe I should give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were incompetent and thought Tor was banned but never did this test. Dynastia seemed surprised when I told him by DM that you can in fact sign up for lolcow.email using Tor, although the person who threatened me on Aug 16 also claimed to be “Dynastia”, or a variant of that nickname.
Although lolcow.email has a prominently displayed “report abuse” button, I would caution against anyone using it. Those messages just go to Moon, who will then post them in a subforum dedicated to mocking victims who complain about being harassed. The “report abuse” form is essentially an “email Josh” form. And I wouldn’t trust Josh Moon or Dynastia any further than I could throw them.
Though I am no closer to learning who really threatened me, I suppose I have learned of a rather glaring inconsistency in how Josh claims Lolcow.email’s system operates and how it in fact operates. Allegedly, Moon’s been questioned by the FBI about other threats sent from this server. The system as it is seems tailor-made to the needs of a stalker, and supporting Tor basically ensures that people looking to send death threats are going to use the server for its intended purpose.
Update 5:35pm EST:
Josh Moon has responded. He says that although he did disable Tor, “Since then, a configuration file was changed during a routine update of nginx (our mail server) and Tor is no longer blocked.” The rest of his comment is pretty NSFW but you can read it in the archive if you like.
Update 6:07 EST:
Changed the article’s headline to reflect Josh’s reply.
Update 9/19/2016:
As of 9/15/16 Josh Moon has blocked Tor access to lolcow.email. I thought I put this up before going away for the weekend, but apparently not; my apologies to him.