Twitter User Shares Story of Insane NeoPets “Organized Crime Ring” as a Nine-Year-Old; Goes Viral

Remember NeoPets? Of course you do.

Nearly 20 years ago, NeoPets was launched on the web which allowed users to own virtual pets and then buy them stuff using virtual currencies. It was basically the OG BitCoin.

Why does this matter? Well, a Twitter user who goes by the handle @everestpipkin shared quite possibly the second longest running Twitter thread in the platform’s history right behind a Chris Randone $KTOV stock analysis. The Twitter thread detailed his extensive NeoPets organized crime ring as a nine-year-old and it’s something. It’s far too long to post in full, but here’s how it starts:

every few years i email neopets support asking if they can help me log into my childhood account and (unsurprisingly, tiny team, millions of old accounts) i've never heard back

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

but it reminded me of why i stopped playing neopets in the first place, which is that neopets took down my organized crime ring based on this exact same circumstance ??

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

as a preteen precriminal, i made a tidy little neopoints profit on "adopting out" painted pets, for slightly cheaper than a neopets paintbrush would run you (which was very expensive). honestly a bit of a puppy farm situation but we all make do

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

the way i had painted pets at less than paintbrush prices was because of "the lab ray", which was accessed via the world's longest treasure hunt. but once you assembled the map you got access to a button that basically did something random to one of your pets once a day pic.twitter.com/BYje43Mbkn

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

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OK, so I’m already lost here and find it pretty remarkable that a nine-year-old could manage an operation like this while I messed around with Pokemon cards.

You can read the whole thread on Twitter, but this kid ended up starting a guild and basically running a NeoPets empire. Then he acquired other accounts which involved just straight up trying to guess random passwords:

finally, even this is not enough. i start going through the user search and find an account that hasn't logged on in a year or two. i go to log in. i type in their name. i pause at the password. i type password. nope. i type passw0rd. no. i type d0ggy. and i'm in

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

i want to say i hesitated, but i was nine and drunk on power and i simply did it. the pet transformed from an aisha to, i believe, a buzz. i thought about how they would feel, returning to a totally different species. would they think they had misremembered? imagined it? i smiled pic.twitter.com/aI5jaFRfGr

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

This is great and all, but it was until 2002 when PayPal was invented that this mastermind began to make real bank.

The rest involves deceit, backstabbing, betrayal, AIM, a rogue second in command, illegal transactions, a murder-for-hire plot, a car chase, money laundering, tax fraud, and Carole Baskin. Here’s how it ends:

and thats when she took 2 and half years of internal conversations, forum posts, text documents, and AIM chats to neopets support and got them to freeze every single account i had ever touched, including my paypal account which i never successfully recovered (being eleven)

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

every account, that is, but one. it wasn't my main account, but i rather liked it. it had a good username. i played games on it! i had pets on it that were mine

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

and its that account that i found today in the 5 gb of neopets passwords. and, in some horrible, final twist of justice, that account which has had its password changed

— everest (@everestpipkin) August 23, 2020

We were doing childhood all wrong.

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