It's come to light today, that one of Paradox Interactive's employees, their community manager John Rickne (also known as TotalyMoo on Reddit), is being attacked in a campaign of cyberstalking, harrassment, and defamation. The attack has taken place within steam reviews, comments, reportedly contacting employees at the same work place as John's mother, facebook posts, and various other unpleasantness over the past month. The person has also created steam profiles that claim to be him, and go on Counter Strike: Global Offensive being loudly offensive according to John, although it appears the account has been deleted. Some of the accusations include stating that he is a pedophile, although steam has also removed those.
Apparently the campaign began because the person was not refunded by steam for I believe Cities Skylines and decided to hold him responsible for some reason. John posted a part of the conversation where he was given the ultimatum and the person's threat as well as statement on contacting people at his mother's workplace.
Paradox has released a statement on the matter that was included in a reddit post that John made so people know that there are false accusations going around:
At Paradox Interactive we have zero tolerance towards threats, false allegations and harassment towards any of our employees. We are pursuing legal action in Sweden and USA in this matter against the individual/s behind this smearing campaign and plan to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. We have been gathering evidence in this issue over the past month since Moo received threats of this very scenario for the first time and will continue to do so until the person those behind it has been brought to justice.
They also posted a tweet that had a similar if shorter gist there that you can also read.
Update: We have removed the picture that was of the log, as apparently it was possible to decipher the person's name from it, and we don't want any witch hunts on people.
Quick Take
I just want to say here that we utterly condemn this type of action and give our best wishes to John and his family at this trying time. Given the fact that the harasser has released a game on steam, it is likely that they will be able to track them down and legal action may be forth coming.
